David Greaves wrote:
then some silly bugger like me will think about it in an entirely different way: (see above URL)
Okay, but more and more people can only learn about hierarchical-ness - e.g. the mouse gesture in Opera to "go up" a level and so on (just thought, I wonder if that works on Opera on a Wii...? :) ).
But as you say, people don't generally type URLs, and having the hierarchy as a /result/ of tinyurl or whatever is still helpful. I'd be most annoyed if a tinyurl displayed the page under that URL I've just entered without changing to the actual location.
I notice the URLs in http://www.theyworkforyou.com/ are not so easy to comprehend (not a criticism - just an example of a more complex problem that doesn't succumb).
Only because we haven't been able to get around to it yet, it could be a lot better, certainly at a 1st/2nd depth level - I believe there's a ticket for it ;)
For the rare occasion we need to type (transcribe) then I'd suggest that tinyURLs are a better UI than informative URLs. They have less chance of transcription error (both because they're shorter and because the user doesn't think they know how to spell).
Yep. However, as you said, how many URLs do you type? Certainly, links are clickable in my email client, so there was no real need for tiny-urls in that email from the BBC that started this discussion. The two arguments here are that some clients (Hotmail in "safe" mode, AOL if you haven't sent the email properly) don't make links clickable, so the user has to copy/paste/type them - tiny-urls doesn't help here, so we can assume the links will be clickable; and that URLs that are too long break across lines, so we need to make them shorter - and I think you could probably make an informative *and* shorter URL, perhaps adjusting between the two depending on your personal preference. If the URLs were stupidly long, I believe that's more likely to be a problem with that URL structure first.
Tiny-urls for transcribing - this presumably means over a phone or similar, in which case I'd say - I'll just send you an email :-) A downside of transcribing tiny-urls is if you do get them wrong, there's probably not much the tiny-url provider can do to help; having a bit of information (and a good web developer) means a 404 page can hopefully be of use. But sadly lots of people aren't good web developers (I'm sure there are lots of places where I too fail on that before anyone goes hunting for any!)
But I do like the fact that http://www.dracos.co.uk/paly/live-trains-ma/ works fine :)
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