Concept blog post about how browsing could be more user-friendly in the future.
After reading the ‘goodbye http‘ blog post on thenextweb.com I first thought that it was a crappy idea to change the way of browsing for users… but @donotfold managed to change my mind…
Let me quote one of his emails:
“Everything that is illogical or irrelevant for the end-user should be popped out, it’s a logical next step in the evolution of the internet and web browsers.”
And after reading that I couldn’t agree more. So we started thinking .. how far can we actually take this? For example; I’m a huge fan of the windows7 explorer. Can’t we port this technique to web browsing? There’s bound to be a point where, by over-simplifying things, you will eventually begin to make it more difficult for the end user … the ultimate goal would be to find that tipping point. So let’s try out some ideas, shall we? 
Our starting point; A regular website made by John Doe with a .com url.
Let’s get rid of the http:// as suggested by google.
And if we can delete the http:// part in URL’s, why not hide the extensions too? No one really cares about whether your site has been made in PHP or ASPX. And why not take this even further and add a breadcrumb system instead of the slashes, you’ll end up with something like this:
You often also have websites that are multilingual (especially in Belgium) so instead of using /nl/, /fr/, /en/ or ?lang=en we can display a flag icon of the current language.
Here’s where the windows7 explorer principle will come in. If we click on the language flag, we can quickly switch between languages, and when we click on the arrow before Home you can select another item in that level from the dropdown.
And now if we take the idea really far … Let’s add the possibility to query your page. Give a selection to show the latest 10 items (where applicable) or show latest 20 items, you can add the possibility to sort those items .. I think you can go quite far with this
Control
How would all of this be controlled? Should it be controlled? A possibility would be to use the sitemap.xml as a basis for the breadcrumb system. And then implement a second, language.xml file for the language dropdown. I, personally, would prefer to be in control instead of the browser generating it all for you. That way, it’s still up to the webmasters if they want to use this function or not.
Conclusion
Would this be an improvement for me? No! For the common user? I believe so. But there’s a point where it will be to difficult, so how far can we really go? How will we handle id’s? Here too, we could choose to just handle this in the background, users don’t necessarily need to be faced with this. But then how do we allow users to share links? We could use a button and convert all links into short links… (http://goo.gl/123) … And I believe we should always have the possibility to switch back to the full path, like the Windows7 explorer does. Suffice it to say that there is a lot to think about and plenty of room for discussion.
Bear in mind that this is a concept … I don’t see any of these suggestions happening any time soon, especially not while browsers are at war with each other and standards aren’t yet where they need to be. Something huge like this should be a unified effort, not a nice-to-have feature in one browser trying to gain on the competitors. So google; nice job starting this! But invite your peers and explain to them the reasons why and the importance for the user.
Join the discussion
As for our little concept, … What do you think? Should everything stay as it is? Is there room for improvement? Let’s start the discussion here, who knows, maybe some good can come of it. 
