Sure, most of these decisions are too entrenched to be fixed.
But yes, URLs should have been structured. We already see paths rendered with breadcrumbs, the protocol replaced with an icon, `www` auto-inserted and hidden, and the domain highlighted. If that's not a structure, I don't know what is.
By cramming everything into the same string, we open ourselves to phishing attacks by domains like `www.google.com.evil.com`, malicious traversal, 404s from mangled relative paths, and much more.
URLs are structured. But when you need to send them across the network or store them on disk or even just send them between different processes on the same machine you need to define what the byte level representation is.
I don't see how you can get away from having a defined serialisation format. People try to operate directly on the serialised data using ad-hoc implementations and run into trouble.
But I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "should have been structured". Eventually you've gotta define the bytes if you want to interoperate with other software.
BoppreH|2 years ago
But yes, URLs should have been structured. We already see paths rendered with breadcrumbs, the protocol replaced with an icon, `www` auto-inserted and hidden, and the domain highlighted. If that's not a structure, I don't know what is.
By cramming everything into the same string, we open ourselves to phishing attacks by domains like `www.google.com.evil.com`, malicious traversal, 404s from mangled relative paths, and much more.
azornathogron|2 years ago
I don't see how you can get away from having a defined serialisation format. People try to operate directly on the serialised data using ad-hoc implementations and run into trouble.
But I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "should have been structured". Eventually you've gotta define the bytes if you want to interoperate with other software.