URLy warning

I’m genuinely shocked that Jake thinks that Chrome hiding URLs is a good thing. On the one hand, he says:

The URL is the share button of the web, and it does that better than any other platform. Linkability and shareability is key to the web, we must never lose that…

I absolutely agree with him there. But I very much disagree when he says:

…and these changes do not lose that.

The method he describes for getting at a URL to share is this:

clicking the origin chip or hitting ⌘-L.

Your average user is no more likely to figure out how to do that then they are to figure out how to view source (something that Chrome buried as a “developer” feature some time ago).

Cennydd recently said of URLs:

And I don’t agree that good URLs are beautiful. Even those are an alphabet soup of slashes, dots, two-letter countries, and no spaces.

— Cennydd Bowles (@Cennydd) May 1, 2014

I mostly agree with him. The protocol portion of the URL is pretty pointless, and the domain name and TLD are never what I would describe as “beautiful”. No, when I talk about beautiful URLs, I mean the path that comes after the protocol, domain name, and TLD gumpf …the very bit that Chrome is looking to hide.

URLs are universal. They work in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, cURL, wget, your iPhone, Android and even written down on sticky notes. They are the one universal syntax of the web. Don’t take that for granted.

URLs are for humans. Design them for humans.

Of course your average user probably won’t even know what a URL is, and nor should they. But they know what a link is. They know that, until now, they could copy the “link” from the top of their browser and paste it into an email, or a text message, or a word processing document.

If this Chrome experiment goes forward, we can kiss all that goodbye.

The security issue that Jake outlines is that browsers need to make the domain name portion of the URL clearly visible. I hope that the smart folks working on Chrome can figure out a way to do that without castrating the browser’s ability to easily share links.

It’s a classic case of:

1. Something must be done!
2. This (killing URLs) is something.
3. Something has been done.

Technically, obfuscating the URL seems to solve the security issue. But technically, decapitation seems to solve a headache.

Webrise

Prompted by my talk, The State Of The Web, Brian zooms out to get some perspective on how browser power is consolidated.

The web is made of clients and servers. There’s a huge amount of diversity in the server space but there’s very little diversity when it comes to clients because making a browser has become so complex and expensive.

But Brian hopes that this complexity and expense could be distributed amongst a large amount of smaller players.

10 companies agreeing to invest $10k apiece to advance and maintain some area of shared interest is every bit as useful as 1 agreeing to invest $100k generally. In fact, maybe it’s more representative.

We believe that there is a very long tail of increasingly smaller companies who could do something, if only they coordinated to fund it together. The further we stretch this out, the more sources we enable, the more its potential adds up.

Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? — Smashing Magazine

This is a very thoughtful and measured response to Alex’s post Platform Adjacency Theory.

Unlike Alex, the author doesn’t fire off cheap shots.

Also, I’m really intrigued by the idea of certificate authorities for hardware APIs.

the Web at a crossroads - Web Directions

John weighs in on the clashing priorities of browser vendors.

Imagine if the web never got CSS. Never got a way to style content in sophisticated ways. It’s hard to imagine its rise to prominence in the early 2000s. I’d not be alone in arguing a similar lack of access to the sort of features inherent to the mobile experience that WebKit and the folks at Mozilla have expressed concern about would (not might) largely consign the Web to an increasingly marginal role.

For the Love of the URL — Aaron Grando

Some URLs are ugly. Some URLs aren’t. Let’s not sacrifice them.

Not The Post I Wanted To Be Writing… – Infrequently Noted

Phew! Alex seems to have calmed down. He’s responding to my concerns about exposing URLs in progressive web apps, but thankfully without the absolutist rhetoric or insults. Progress!