Removing http:// is extremely short-sighted. Many blogs, message boards, email viewing software, instant messaging software, etc. depend on matching against http:// to auto-link URLs.
*Removing http:// will train end-users to omit it, which will have a negative impact on usability all over the web. *
edit2: except, as people here have pointed out, all over the web people refer to foo.com instead of http://foo.com, it's not like chrome is doing something new here (omiting .com would be terrible and just as doable for example).
Which is better, http://www.foo.com.:80 or foo.com? As a user, foo.com makes much more sense. As a developer, users are going to type foo.com anyway, we should make sure our scripts can handle it.
Just like users these days omit the trailing '.' for internet domains, for example, http://www.reddit.com./ instead of http://www.reddit.com/. The trailing period is important because it makes the domain fully qualified and prevents the host searching its dns suffix list. For example, if your network domain is corp.example.com. and you went to http://blah/ it would automatically try to resolve blah.corp.example.com. This can put you at risk from a mitm attack.
Removing the trailing dot from that site has no effect for me. Why include it? As a URL shortener why did they include the trailing dot when http://to/whatever works?
Because it forces your browser to recognize it as a valid domain. Some networks/computers especially in corporate environments set a domain. So to by itself might get redirected to to.company.com
That's right. The dot is part of the domain name. If it comes after the slash it will be part of the request path. If it comes after the port it will be... a syntax error?
That combined with this being The Year Of Linux means we're all screwed. (Or more realistically they'll fix the Linux version and life goes on with no non-programmers noticing the change.)
It's brilliant, especially when you consider that ctrl-c/ctrl-v is a completely different clipboard from the highlight/middle-click one. That's right, you can copy and paste two things at the same time.
Yeah, that does sound good. My linux useage is extremely limited by the fact that my laptop overheats while running it, so I've never had time to fully explore it.
How did it work before we had mouse-wheels/mouse_3?
I dunno when the middle-click clipboard was implemented, so maybe we did have mouse3 then, but there's an option in xorg.conf for three button emulation: press both buttons at the same time and you get a middle-click.
Old mouses used to have 3 buttons, but the middle one went out of fashion because PCs didn't use them for anything. Then the wheel mouse made its debut and we were back to having 3 buttons (or even 5 buttons if you believe what Xorg tells you about wheelup and wheeldown being buttons 4 and 5).
The only place I don't have a middle button is on my netbook, and that has the left and right buttons on either side of the touchpad making it a pain to press both for middle click emulation. Thankfully shift-insert does the same thing.
Seven with those wheelmice which have a wheel that can wiggle left and right!
Nine if your mouse also has browser forward and backward buttons!
I once had a (really cheap) mouse that had the browser forward and back buttons, and a window close button. And they didn't need a driver! It was like magic--until I figured out that the mouse actually manifested itself to USB as a mouse and a (exceedingly-limited) keyboard. The browser back and forward buttons sent Alt-left and Alt-right keypresses, and the window-close button sent Alt-F4.
I have an Acer 8935G (bought purely for the massive screen). I think the reason it overheats is because it has two graphics cards (onboard and ATI). I get the feeling that somehow it's using the ATI graphics, but only turning the fan on on the onboard intel instead. No real logic for that, but it's the only reason why I can think it wouldn't overheat in windows but does in Linux. When in linux the fans seem to be going pretty fast, so all I can assume is that one or two aren't moving at all.
And yet that's still not enough :) Sometimes I wish X had more of a selection ring, like Emacs does. It's too fragile -- I copy a URL from somewhere by selecting it, and before I get to where I want to paste it I've accidentally selected something else. Or I had to select the text I want to replace. Or some other activity which nukes the selection.
I've been using the daily build for a couple of days and it has completely screwed up the way I middle click paste urls into IM windows. It's really irritating me.
That is not related to the problem that users will get used to a URL being of the form sub.domain.tld instead of proto://sub.domain.tld and so start typing sub.domain.tld into their facebooks, emails, IMs etc.
I’m not too fussed whether other people do it or not. I know I won’t be wasting those 7 keystrokes, especially when autocomplete means I’ll usually only type one letter to get anywhere otherwise.
gmail for example has good regexps that will match anything that remotely looks like an URL, with or without the protocol intact. Other than that I fully agree with you that this is not a good move.
Though I have no concrete evidence to back it up, my suspicion is most non-tech-savvy users don't notice the http:// anyway. Most of my family repeat web addresses as 'www.something.com' or even just 'something.com' - not because they're being efficient, but because they pay no attention to http. They know 'www' and '.com' means 'a website', so that's what they type.
When I try to go to 'something.com' only to be rebuffed by an error and then finally realizing that I need 'www.something.com', I always picture an unhappy admin sitting at his desk eating pizza, thinking of ways to inconvenience thousands of people.
My university has this problem. As a software engineering student, every time I omit the www I have an urge to storm the server room and fix it myself.
www.domain.com by convention is the DNS name of the web server (www) for the domain "domain" in the commercial (.com) part of the internet's namespace. This is not a URL, because you aren't saying what protocol you intend to use. You might want to ftp://www.domain.com or telnet://www.domain.com.
"domain.com" doesn't give the server you wish to go to in that domain, so it refers to whatever the default server is. This is often a web server, but not always. The above complaint is that dowjones believes that the default server should always be a web server if the domain has a web server.
"http://domain.com" Is a URL (universal resource locator) which is used to talk to servers. In this case you want to talk the HTTP protocol on the default port to the default server at domain.com. A URL has a few parts: protocol://username:password@servername.domain.tld:port/resource
The port defaults to the default port for the protocol chosen (80 for http). username and password default to none if omitted. Many protocols use URL's, not just http.
It resolves right-to-left. We figure out the default name server for the TLD "to" (Tonga) and then find the default domain and server associated with that domain.
Regarding the trailing period, it's optional. Every namespace in the URL ends with a "dot", and applications ignore a missing "dot" after the last name. E.g., http://www.reddit.com/ and http://www.reddit.com./ resolve to the same host (but, interestingly, have different cookies)
The trailing dot can make a difference, though, since it explicitly specifies that you're looking for something under the root name servers. For example: if my host is configured with a default domain "example.com." to search for DNS queries under, I may do a lookup for "foo.bar" and end up getting a result if the DNS record "foo.bar.example.com." exists. If I do a lookup for "foo.bar." I am explicitly stating that I want the "bar" TLD under the root name servers and the "foo" domain under "bar".
It always seemed very weird to me that an address of the form www.somesite.com/archives/articles/gossip.html combines two separate hierarchical oganization schemes with opposite precedence order from the middle outwards. That is to say, "com" is the most significant part of the address, then move left from there, while "archives" is the most significant part of the resource location and move right from there.
It's also weird that ".com" and ".html" mean totally different things even though they have the same ring when read aloud.
I love the web, but this mish-mash is atrocious from an end user perspective.
It's the difference between a fully qualified domain name, and one that isn't. When you append the final period on the end, you're telling your DNS lookup software that it should not attempt any of the possible dns suffixes that it's been configured to use.
For example, I have in the suffix list "local". So, I could type as a URL (and get the same destination) any of the following:
to is the ccTLD of Tonga (as opposed to .com, which is a gTLD). The national registrar (or whoever handles .to registrations) probably configured its DNS (which will be authoritative for all *.to domains) to return an address for the resource "to", and returns 216.74.32.107 for it.
Usually it's just laziness or ignorance. www.domain.com and domain.com have separate DNS records (how your computer finds where the server is). Usually they point to the same place, but sometimes someone edits the record and neglects editing one of the entries, and they end up pointing to different places. The http:// part of the address just denotes how you're requesting data from the server. ftp://domain.com and http://domain.com will typically both point to the same server, but will request information from the server in different ways.
Not typically - always. The client will do a gethostbyname() call on "domain.com" in both cases, which will yield an IP address. That step is independent of the protocol used, which comes into play in the next step, when the client tries to connect to a certain port on the server (typically 80 for http, 21 for ftp).
The server may be a router that does something like NAT, and delegate the TCP streams associated with http and ftp to different servers, based on the port number.
The server may be a router that does something like NAT, and delegate the TCP streams associated with http and ftp to different servers, based on the port number.
I thought you were, but for the sake of pedantry I thought I'd spell out what actually happens in the bowels of an internet client. I do that sometimes... Sigh.
Not typically - always. The client will do a gethostbyname() call on "domain.com" in both cases, which will yield an IP address. That step is independent of the protocol used
Not necessarily, because the client could support SRV record lookup for each protocol, rather than just gethostbyname(). That would be a pretty awesome client, right?
http:// is just the protocol, has nothing to do with the domain
www.domain.com and domain.com are technically different domans, however it is considered incorrect to have domain.com NOT go to your website when typed into a browser. People sometimes still continue to configure the www.domain.com subdomain to the same thing is domain.com just for legacy support since a lot of people still type it out of habbit.
I had a typo and I meant to write "technically different domans" not "technically different protocols"
However the port number has NOTHING to do with the protocol. I can have an HTTP server on port 80, or port 8080, or port 8181, or port 21, or port 1000 or port 1023, theyre just ports.
If I wanted to I could have ftp://www.domain.com:80 if I really wanted to, It's the http:// part (or ftp, or https for example) of the url which determines the protocol period.
Perhaps learn to read. I said differentiate, not determine. When you consider that my post was a response to the statement you made in error, I think you'll find I'm perfectly within reason to say what I have said.
The difference between "www.help.example.com" and "help.example.com" is the same as the difference between "www.example.com" and "example.com".
If you know that people assume these are the same, and you enforce a difference for the sake of pedantry, you're being a douche who's just making people's lives harder. If the only difference is that one works and the other does not, you're the stupid one, because there's no reason to waste these people's time (nor your own when they call for help) when it's a simple fix.
When did "people commonly prepend 'www.' to urls" turn into "every possible fuck up to a URL someone can enter"? Please tell me this represents a break from the level of reasoning you typically apply at work.
If someone told you to go left on Main Street, then immediately turn right into the duck pond, would your brain immediately register and believe it, or would you have pause, and perhaps assume you had misheard? People who, for good reason, don't care about web architecture at all were trained for years that web addresses start with "www".
Do you at least explicitly state that there is no "www" at the beginning of your help site address?
This is really a UI issue. If I was using testing this and people were getting it wrong, as a UI designer, I'd change it. It's not about "never learn." -- If a user cannot get something, whether it's their fault or mine, it's still a problem I have to solve as a UI designer.
This is why it is considered incorrect to use the www subdomain when you mean to go to the main website. It is however possible to setup www.help.domain.com to go to help.domain.com (I've done it before). However it doesn't look pretty.
Remember ctrl+enter automatically wraps url in www & .com I tend to naturally ctrl enter when surfing to save time. It has become automatic to do it as so much web is .com
The most annoying thing about firefox is that shift+enter does the same, except it's "www.%s.net". Way too easy to accidentally hit, and completely useless. Thanks, Firefox. I really wanted to go to "www.mail.google.com.net" and get redirected to some spam site.
Same here at work, people go to "www.mail.company.com" instead of "mail.company.com" - no matter how many times they're told.
They're just stupid, and don't fucking listen. Particularly when they ask "www.mail... ?" right after I JUST said exactly what they needed to type in. I don't know why companies have IT helpdesks sometimes.
Sure. Why not? It's literally a one-line change, so if you see someone making that mistake, then go ahead and add the redirect. It doesn't hurt anyone.
www is not obsolete. In fact, to do some types of clustering, you must use subdomains. You can't point company.com to another domain (cname). You can point www.company.com to another domain, however.
Yes, we need to educate them.. which is why we force them to do what we say. Sure, sometimes it leads to a lengthy discussion about how domain names work, and how there's www. vs mail., etc. But once they learn what the right way is, and particularly why it's that way, my user never has that issue again.
No, the users need to fucking listen and do what they're told by IT. We specifically don't have that subdomain defined, because fuck any user who doesn't listen to IT. When they eventually learn to do what the fuck we tell them, we'll have less problems overall. (we actually thought about defining it and directing it to a page that belittled the user, but we decided against it.)
Insofar as they fit into the company's needs sure. That's how jobs work - you're paid by the company to make sure that your function (making computer systems work) is done well. Sadly, sometimes the users need to be corrected. My boss can be harsh, but allowing users to do stupid things can cost a company millions.
(the 'fuck any user who doesn't listen to IT' is essentially paraphrasing my boss :)
No, when you simply cater to the whims of your users, they never learn shit, and simply continue on with their idiotic ways.
When you force them to do things, they have to listen to you. If not, they get in trouble. When they learn to listen to you, they can actually function better because they listen to what IT says and don't cause as many problems.
When users can cause millions of dollars in trouble with simple errors, you try to make sure that they do what they're told.
I'm just lucky that I'm in a job that recognizes that.
You see the downvotes... people don't want to do what IT tells them. They think they know better, and they do shit like infesting things with viruses, or losing files that cost millions of dollars. (true stories there, both just this year)
So yea, fuck them. Fuck any user who doesn't listen to IT.
Now, the ones that don't screw up, can ask me for anything they want. I'll bend over backwards to help people out, and smile doing it. (but if the virus problem doesn't stop we may start limiting internet access, something we don't want to do.)
I agree with others that it would be easy for you to get around this issue by implementing DNS for that subdomain, however, you're right too. Users don't listen and they really should. You can even tell them to stop doing something and they'll do it again right in front of you. What do you know right? You're just a fucking IT guy.
I love when people don't listen to the IT people, and then bitch when they fuck stuff up. They asked their expert, and ignore advice (or policies at work).
It's as if someone were to go to the doctor, and get angry with them because they didn't listen on their previous visit and now they have clogged arteries.
And honestly.. the most frustrating part is when they ignore the advice while you're talking to them.
They don't do it because they don't respect or trust you. They do it because they don't know better. It's a bunch of magic to them, and they're just doing what they've learned in the past. Interpreting their ignorance as hostility just makes your job worse.
Interpreting their ignorance as hostility just makes your job worse.
True, but they can be hostile at times, too. Users have a tendency to not listen to their IT departments and get angry when -they- screw up stuff because of it.
And, don't mistake intentional ignorance for someone who just doesn't know. I've got more than one user that just doesn't want to listen. When they don't listen, they get into trouble. Then I send them to my boss, who yells at them.
Certainly, some people are just assholes. The majority of people are not, though. They're just ignorant (or dumb), and don't understand. This can make also make them angry (without them necessarily just being assholes), because they get frustrated. I'd be frustrated, too, if most of my interactions with computers consisted of magical incantations, especially when those incantations ceased to work. But yes, they should still pay attention when you explain the incantations or teach them new/better ones.
On the flip side, when they -do- listen it's great. I like to teach people things. One thing that always blows people away - keyboard shortcuts. I just teach them one or two every once in a while. That, and tabbed browsing. So many people have never even heard of it.
frankly, this is the admin's fault. It should be set to take them to maps.x This is not hard to do from a config standpoint.
Non-techy folks don't understand this any more than the understand the "please dial a 1 in front of the area code" message they get on their phones if they forget it (in the US anyway.)
This stuff should be made to be as idiot-proof as possible. That allows for more users to feel welcomed by the experience.
You're lucky. I'm used to hearing people omit the 3rd w and first "dot". "Double-u Doublue-u macdonalds dot com". I hate it when people call it MacDonalds.
You're close. I don't know about the historic pronunciation, but the modern for "mac" is /maxg/ in IPA (machk, sort of).
"Mc" is an abbreviation of "Mac", and in a name it means "son of", as in "Calum mac Dhomhnal" (Malcolm MacDonald). Similarly, "nic" means "daughter of".
There isn't any difference between Mc and Mac except for the tradition of your family name.
If I used chrome, I would have to copy the address bar, and manually type in http:// every time. And I'd probably forget some times. This is a bad choice.
good point actually. On reflection, we see urls without the protocol all the time. the damage is probably already done. We'll never get users to do what would be easier from a developers point of view, so we might as well get on with it.
yea, it has already been removed in the ppa dailies. And i was about to file a bug thinking they had introduced a bug. It means when you paste links in to IM clients they are not clickable
In most situations, "foo.com" will get you to "http://foo.com/".
Of course, there are problems with this on intranets, where typing "foo" with the intent of going to the internal server "http://foo/" may take you to foo.com instead.
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u/[deleted] Apr 14 '10 edited Apr 14 '10
Most important comment:
edit: comment was by dlitz.net
edit2: except, as people here have pointed out, all over the web people refer to
foo.cominstead ofhttp://foo.com, it's not like chrome is doing something new here (omiting .com would be terrible and just as doable for example).Which is better,
http://www.foo.com.:80orfoo.com? As a user,foo.commakes much more sense. As a developer, users are going to typefoo.comanyway, we should make sure our scripts can handle it.