To the left. Take it back now y’all. One hop this time.
January 4th, 2009
Biz Stone: “Look closely at the URL because it could be a scam.”
I wonder what percentage of twitter users understand the confusing direction switches in HTTP URLs.
Mr. C The Slide Man: “Alright, now we gonna do the basic steps.”
You start with the scheme and the authority separator (”//”), which read left to right.
------> http://
The authority component (domain name) delegates right to left.
------> <-------------- http:// www.twitter.com
Then, the authority ends with a "/". The path begins, moving left to right.
------> <-------------- -----------> http:// www.twitter.com /foo/bar/baz
If there's a query component, the direction doesn't matter.
------> <-------------- -----------> ^^^^^^^^ http:// www.twitter.com /foo/bar/baz ?foo=bar
Same with a fragment.
------> <-------------- -----------> ^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^ http:// www.twitter.com /foo/bar/baz ?foo=bar #quux
January 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm
Cha cha y’all!
January 4th, 2009 at 7:37 pm
One could argue that an explicit port number reverses the direction in the middle of the authority, but is distinct from the path:
——>
http:// http://www.twitter.com:8080
January 5th, 2009 at 5:42 am
Does this give more support to the argument that we should be setting browser.identity.ssl_domain_display to 1 by default (at the very least for SSL and EVSSL?)
January 5th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Gen, I don’t think so. We have no evidence that it works, but it would be worth looking into. It also might be less effective in Firefox than other browsers, since our UI is much more visually complex than say, Safari or Chrome.
Stepping back, I think our users would be better served by authentication technology that protected passwords and required them to enter secrets less often.
I think it’s a mistake to view this as a UI problem.