Not to laypeople. Most people have no idea what query params are, or even what part of the url the top level domain is. You can explain what they are easily, but it still wouldn't be useful to laypeople. What can my mom do with "item?id=24156986"? Outside of developing something that interfaces with HN, I don't know what I would do with that info either.
A layperson wouldn't know what the "7394" in "7394 Foobar Road" means or why "Foobar Road" is a road called "Foobar" but that does not mean we should give Google the right to eliminate street addresses.
A URL is an address. All your mom needs to know is that if she goes to https://news.ycombimator.com/item?id=24156986, she will end up at something and she will be able to come back to it later, that's what's useful about it. And besides, there are URLs that are semantically useful, such as reddit's "u/username" or "r/subreddit" schemes.
Of course, the URL is being assaulted from two other fronts, with websites turning into single page apps and with social networks constantly making it difficult to share URLs.
People type street addresses into forms all the time though. Of all the times people type in a web address, what percent of the time do you think they type in anything past the tld? 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it.
I think that's what it comes down to: if you're just copying and pasting the whole thing, there is no need to show the user all the garbage after the tld, it may as well be totally random characters to them. You can still copy and paste the whole thing.
I'm not sure whether I'm in favor of this change or not, but I can see there are at least some valid reasons to do it.
> 99% of all the times they enter something in the address bar that is longer than just the tld, it probably got there by them pasting it.
Then the existence of the URL is still justified by giving the user something to paste. So what if the user doesn't know what every single part of the URL means? They know that this URL gets them to this page and that URL gets them to that page. It's visible cause and effect. Get rid of it and we end up with "magic" where copying "news.ycombinator.com" on one page will produce a different outcome from copying "news.ycombinator.com" on a different page. This is how it works on iOS today and I think that eventually, users who only interact with iOS devices will not know what to make of that.
Weo hide all complexity from non-technical users then winder why they don't understand the complexity that's still there underneath. I don't believe that we should continue doing that. If the problem with URLs is the URLs being long and scary, let's make websites with better and more readable URLs.
The average person knows that a URL is a string that (for all intents and purposes) uniquely identifies a web page on the internet.
There are some cases, like with Facebook/Google/YouTube, where they add a bunch of tracking info onto the URL, obscuring which segments of the URL are optional vs. required.
But I think that's exactly the point, isn't it? To make it a lot less noticeable when you're being tracked. This change will enable a lot of URL funnybusiness that harms users.
I think the point is that outside of some big sites like Reddit with /r/ that over time the actual path has become completely meaningless and is just a site-specific chunk of data that sometimes happens to be a permalink useful to users but often is just a way for the site-operator to organize their stuff.
This whole thing is just a reflection of the trend that URLs just mean actual.user.path.domain.tld/server/route#client/route
Funny, I actually can't thing of anyone under the age of 30, lay or otherwise, who hasn't figured out that odd looking string in the URL bar is the name of the web page. They then rapidly figure out if they want to share that web page with a friend, all they need to do is send them that string. I don't know how they've learnt that, but I'm guessing seeing it they are the top of on every web page must be a bit of a give away. If that doesn't give it away, they first time they have to copy and paste a URL it probably dawns on them.
Shorter version: you say people don't notice patterns when they see the same thing over and over again. I've don't think I've met anyone under 30 who doesn't. And once they've noticed, they then exploit the patterns to their own advantage.
I'm not saying they don't understand that the domain name specifies a site, and the entire thing identifies a unique page on that site (usually), I'm saying how the latter works is virtually magic to them. They don't parse the contents or do anything with the pieces, it may as well be random letters and numbers after the tld.
My assertion is that the vast majority of people do two things with the address bar:
1. Manually type in a web site address, but nothing past the top level domain
2. Copy or paste the entire thing
I think what you're asserting is that people look at them, understand them, and then apply that knowledge somehow. I disagree with at least the last part, and probably the first two to a lesser degree.
What percent of laypeople do you think have manually altered a URL like your eBay example? I've done the same thing with Amazon product links myself, but I don't know anybody else who has. I just don't think it's very common at all.
How is Hacker News item 24156986 that different from say Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire page 134? Even ordinary people can understand numbered things with info on.
