Comment Re:And the question of the day is... (Score 1) 327
"The part after the first colon...
I stopped paying attention right there, and I actually know what you're describing (in fact I almost remembered the IRI RFC number off the top of my head even though I haven't looked at it for a couple years; I had transposed the 9 and the 8). It's not the users who are stupid, it's the systems and software designers. I have to know this shit because it's my job. Asking people to remember or comprehend an arbitrary sequence of characters that is not directly meaningful to them is bad design.
And it doesn't end there. URLs are a showcase of bad design. Numerous characters that have different meaning depending on context. Characters that are effectively meaningless but hey, they're required anyway. Characters that are allowed to be meaningless after they're meaningful. Escaping rules that are different depending on context. Segments that are literally never sent down the wire in a request. Fucking interchangeable delimiters in a query string! (But hey, depends on your web server. Good luck guessing. You have one fact on your side if you care enough to know any of this shit, and it's that the worst choice is by far the most common.) It's downright user-hostile to developers, and if you think I'm kidding go look for how developers try to match URLs, and I'm saying that as a guilty party (you can probably find that gem, if you can't I'll give you a few hints). And you want people who don't care to make sense of it?
URLs are probably never going away. There is too much infrastructure and frankly economy around the current design. But for fuck's sake no one should have to read a complete URL unless they want to, and unless they want to it's actually harmful to show it to them. The only thing most people need to know is the domain name and top level domain (and they shouldn't have to know the TLD either, thanks whitehouse.com). The rest is noise for anything but machines and nerds. And if anyone wants to become a nerd, according to the Chrome feature, finding the noise is only a click or key command away.