.com is also useless technobabble. We should strip it and only show TLDs other than com.
Re:The importance of “http://”
by chaosmachine on Sunday April 18, 2010 @09:46AM
(#1274816)
It's a bit late in the game, but maybe we could adopt a new one-character standard to replace http:// with something shorter, but still easy to parse, like the @name system being made popular by twitter, etc. Some ideas:
:news.ycombinator.com
$news.ycombinator.com
!news.ycombinator.com
- the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable.
What?! I know of no one who ever, ever, ever said http:// when mentioning a URL. I certainly don’t do that.
#define mention(url) type_or_paste_into_facebook(url)
Re:The importance of “http://”
by krainboltgreene on Sunday April 18, 2010 @09:51AM
(#1274824)
People have been using "lol, hey, go to www.google.com" for years without problems.
- the users will alter their behavior when mentioning the URLs (as I did just above). And will wonder why they are not linkable.
Now either the site owners have to jump through the hoops to replicate the second-guessing logic to their sites, or everyone who views the URL, will have to copy/paste manually.
Another couple of questions I will start asking as a user: why does the ftp:// thing pops up in front of the URL if I use it ? And, what is https:// and why is it suddenly there when I only want to go to gmail.com ?
This change noticeably increases the number of places which violate the principle of least surprise. But maybe I am a corner-case :-)
EDIT:
And, if we look at the whole "address bar" under the same UI angle - the path and the query string is equally a useless technobabble for anyone non-geek. So, I think we would go further and just show the host name, while we are at it.