[9621] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: URL Expansion proposal
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Arnt Gulbrandsen)
Mon Jan 15 06:21:31 1996
Date: Mon, 15 Jan 1996 11:47:23 +0100
From: Arnt Gulbrandsen <agulbra@troll.no>
To: idelrio@abstraction.com (Israel del Rio)
Cc: donahue@acf2.nyu.edu, www-talk@w3.org
In-Reply-To: idelrio@abstraction.com's message of Sun, 14 Jan 1996 23:51:13
-0700
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
idelrio@abstraction.com (Israel del Rio)
> Adam, if thinking me extremely inept helps you heighten your dubious
> self-worth, be my guest. Understanding the URL concept is not that
> difficult; but understanding that computers ougth to adapt to actual
> people and not to technical snobs is something you have yet to
> learn.
I quite agree that computers need to adapt to people rather than the
opposite. Anyone who wishes to argue against that should read Donald
Norman's excellent book The Psychology of Everyday Things.
But your proposal doesn't do that, it simplifies an arbitrary part of
most people's use of the web, which is a different thing entirely.
Your proposal only simplifies life for those users who haven't yet
learnt the old format, and who will never need or want to use an URL
outside the .com domain or which doesn't use HTTP. For the rest, your
proposal adds a new and irregular URL format to learn.
You say in an earlier messages that "99% of the Internet users are not
simply interested in the nuisances of FTP, NEWS, Gopher, etc." I
assume you mean nuances, not nuisances, but anyway, do you mean that
99% of users only ever use URLs in the .com domain? Do you mean that
HTTPng will never be relevant to people who only use .com servers?
If you answer no to either question, I don't see how you can still
defend that proposal.
--Arnt
