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> But people often need to parse URLs before they provide them to their computers (via click or keyboard)

Users don't provide URLs unless they type them in the address bar. And if they're doing that, it's likely just the domain name, and very rarely anything more than that.

If they're clicking a URL, then what the URL looks like is meaningless, and often does not even need to be shown to the user. Again, the only reason they care about what a URL looks like is because we've conditioned them to care. It bares no meaning on them being able to access a page.

> The issue is that URLs are often the only piece of information users receive

Why is this? Why do they ever even see the URL?

If it's visible to the user on a page, then replace the URL in the <a></a> tags with a meaningful description of a URL. Showing a user a URL is bad UX (unless you're audience are power users, but that's not what this article is talking about).

> From our standpoint, it's not too hard to make URLs more meaningful, even with user-generated content.

I would argue this is not true. Take Amazon for example. Converting "Panasonic-KX-TG7743S-Bluetooth-Cordless-Answering" to a product in the database is a nightmare I don't want to deal with. Computers work better with surrogate identifiers that are short, and they're easier to generate.

But then add user-generated content. Who is responsible for generating the meaningful unique identifier for the content? "Sorry, that content ID is taken. Try another one." :)

> Would you prefer a link to http://www.example/about or a link to http://www.example.com/?id=123.

An "about" page is a complete different situation, and these static pages are often limited in number on dynamic sites like this article is referring to. Of course they can, and should, have a meaning (there's no reason to give it a surrogate identifier).

But if a computer is responsible for creating the content, and the address to access that content, then why go through the trouble of giving the URL a meaning?

> Which are you able to understand before clicking it? Which are you more likely to click?

Why do I care what the link is? When I see it on a page, I should see "About", not "http://www.example.com/?id=123.

2 comments

Here's a recent tweet from a friend:

> My thoughts on what I believe is a bad article on HN: “URLs are for people, not computers”. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5499730 http://www.not-implemented.com/urls-are-for-people-not-compu...

URLs are a way of life. Of course the ideal solution is a semantic hyperlink, but people don't share hyperlinks, they share URLs, and they don't always take the time to type out a nice description like the above tweet contains.

> I would argue this is not true. Take Amazon for example. Converting "Panasonic-KX-TG7743S-Bluetooth-Cordless-Answering" to a product in the database is a nightmare I don't want to deal with. Computers work better with surrogate identifiers that are short, and they're easier to generate.

I don't think computers care one way or the other, and it's not hard to generate a key like that at all. In your example, you'd simply have brand + model + short description. In most other cases, you'd simply take the title of content that was submitted. It's a very common solution to this problem [1]. The idea is that a short description is part of the item in the database. It's not some sort of complicated lookup that acts like a keyword search.

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/models/fields/#slu...

I agree that URLs should be for machines, and that SEO in url paths is stupid, but I disagree that urls should be hidden from users. If you're talking about browser UI, it could show the full domain, and hide the protocol and url path unless the url is clicked on, but the full url needs to be readily accessible.

> Why is this? Why do they ever even see the URL?

Because the url often transmits more information than what's in the page title. For better or for worse.

Because the web is about inter-site linking. You can't link if you can't see the full url to a page. You seem to think that only automated software or "power users" would ever want to create links.

> Why do I care what the link is?

You've never wanted to link to anyone else's pages? It's not just power users who do this. Casual internet users share full url links all the time. Requiring more than one click to get at the full URL is burdensome and would change linking on the web.

The web is not the only place urls are used, and http, https, spdy are not the only url protocols in existence. In some cases urls are the only information you have about a resource, and it takes quite a while to get additional information. BTIH, for instance, can take a while to get the torrent depending on the initial connection status to the p2p cloud. In other cases, there may never be any additional information about a resource besides the content of the url. You can't hide urls like those. The URL bar needs to stay. It doesn't have to show full url paths all the time, but it needs to be ready to in a click.

Search engines already understand this, but they go as far wrong in the other direction with SEO signals based on url paths, which encourages pathological descriptive url paths rather than encouraging url paths that are merely adequately identifying.