Re:The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth
by pfranz on Monday July 18, 2016 @10:12PM
(#12119109)
My guess is that it'll stick to "example.com" unless we switch to a proprietary service (like Facebook or Twitter). A nice thing about "example.com" is that it gives you enough context to know it's a web address and you type it in your browser. Thinking back to AOL, they always had to say "AOL Keyword: Example" or "Keyword: Example" to give you enough context. Years ago maybe doing something like having it blue and underlined might have caught on and let you just use the word?
One way it could be shorter and keep context is if we hijacked a special character like Twitter does #example or @twitter--but I can't imagine standards bodies getting on board with using a special character (or trying to get people to adopt it as a replacement for web URLs).
Re:The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth
by pfranz on Tuesday July 19, 2016 @03:35PM
(#12124219)
One way I just thought of that wouldn't sacrifice a special character would be to come up with some symbol that means URL and have web browsers use that next to their URL bar. Could be an emoji-like symbol--maybe something similar to the html5 shield? But luck getting everyone on board with that.
URLs started as "http://www.example.com" in the late 90's, and then went to "www.example.com", and are now mostly "example.com". For major trademarks, it could be the natural progression to just go to "example". Or not - internet use is weirdly unpredictable.