Beneath the URL shorteners, the web!
It’s increasingly apparent that a more digitally literate citizenry would be good for a thousand different reasons. A great way to start would be to make URLs visible again, to let people see the infrastructure they’re living in.
This is such a great write-up of the workshop I did in Hong Kong!
Jeremy, it was a pleasure to work with you and you are always welcome here in Hong Kong!
If you fancy having this one-day workshop at your company, get in touch.
When I’m asked to give an example of a beautiful piece of design, perfect in form and function, I often respond with “the URL.”
I love every word of this beautifully-written love letter from Brendan.
Sharing an experience without asking you to install software is something only the web can do.
How a certificate with extended validation makes it easier to phish. But I think the title could be amended—here’s what’s really broken:
On Safari, the URL is completely hidden! This means the attacker does not even need to register a convincing phishing domain. They can register anything, and Safari will happily cover it with a nice green bar.
I quite like the idea of broadcasting my URL from a friendchip bracelet.
If Safari is updating its “share” functionality to look for canonical URLs, then that should work not just for AMP pages, but also Medium posts that include a canonical URL (like the ones created by posting to the Medium API, which is what I’m doing).
So many folks spend time on their CSS and their UX/UI but still come up with URLs that are at best, comically long, and at worst, user hostile.
Domains registered with punycode names (and then given TLS certificates) are worryingly indistinguishable from their ASCII counterparts.
Can you spot the difference between the URLs https://adactio.com and https://аdаctіо.com?
The largest complaint by far is that the URLs for AMP links differ from the canonical URLs for the same content, making sharing difficult. The current URLs are a mess.
This is something that the Google gang are aware of, and they say they’re working on a fix. But this post points out some other misgivings with AMP, like its governance policy:
This keeps the AMP HTML specification squarely in the hands of Google, who will be able to take it in any direction that they see fit without input from the community at large. This guise of openness is perhaps even worse than the Apple News Format, which at the very least does not pretend to be an open standard.
A really clear introduction to the pieces of a URL by Vera, who is setting out on her career as a front-end developer.
Some more food for thought, following on from Shaun’s post about HTML as the foundation of web development:
There is another building block for the web, one that is more important than HTML, CSS and JavaScript combined. It all starts with URLs. Those things uniquely identify some piece of information on the web.
Jonathan takes a look at the physical web. Like me, he’s excited by the possibilities. Although he says:
Sadly, my mind quickly devolved into the annoyance of numerous notifications, like popup windows and other distracting adverts, vying for my attention.
This is a common worry with the physical web, but it’s unfounded. All a beacon does is broadcast a URL. You have to actively look for the URLs being broadcast—they can’t send notifications.
It all just feels like QR codes. They’ll be all over the place and most of them won’t be very useful.
I understand this concern, but whereas QR codes are completely opaque to humans, at least URLs can—and should—be human-readable …so, unlike QR codes, a URL can give you some idea of what awaits.
Another dive into the archives of the www-talk mailing list. This time there are some gems about the origins of the input element, triggered by the old isindex element.
From the ARPANET to the internet, this is a great history of the Domain Name System:
Root DNS servers operate in safes, inside locked cages. A clock sits on the safe to ensure the camera feed hasn’t been looped. Particularly given how slow DNSSEC implementation has been, an attack on one of those servers could allow an attacker to redirect all of the Internet traffic for a portion of Internet users. This, of course, makes for the most fantastic heist movie to have never been made.
The second book in Adam Scott’s series on ethical web development is a nice quick read, covering URL design, Service Workers, and performance.
This sixteen year old cool URI has not changed. I think this idea of domains entering an archive state is worth pursuing.
Also, I love the science fictional footnote “Note for readers after 2100”.
Andreas demoed these ideas yesterday. Proper ambient badging and a way of getting at URLs even if a progressive web app is running in fullscreen or standalone mode. Great stuff!
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!
Matthias Beitl takes a stab at trying to tackle the tricky UI problem of exposing the URLs of Progressive Web Apps. This stuff is hard.