Think about it. It's time consuming, and boring, to type HTTP:// all the time. We have a symbol for at in e-mails @, so why not one for HTTP://? It could even go as far as a the WWW. (To go to extremes, there could be a .Com symbol as well.-- QuadAlpha, Jul 27 2000 How about the empty symbol, ""? Most browsers support it...-- egnor, Jul 27 2000 This would be great, one symbol, one key, to specify the type of URL.. maybe ftp://, etc symbols too (for each type of URL in the standard).-- amadeus, Jul 27 2000 Good work! This is so half-baked I honestly can't tell whether the original author is joking or not.
Firstly, nobody but me types http:// anymore when talking to their browsers. When they see something that looks like a one-word relative URL, most popular browsers briefly try what they're supposed to do, then do the obvious http://www ... com/org completion and just go there. This is relying on the browser manufacturers to moderate subject access in the domain name space, but most people don't quite understand their movements on the net to begin with, so that's okay.
Secondly, small improvements in the face of existing, widely used syntax just don't matter. If you have N gazillion people and installed software out there that does something in a certain way, changing that syntax is very, very hard. Think of all the badly written perl scripts that do something to "every URL". The three-year old browser versions that don't understand the new URL you're using. Etc.
Thirdly, the "http" part is extensible. There is no one "standard". There are tens, if not hundreds, of different little schemas defined for all sorts of protocols used to transfer the data. It's bad architecture to prejudice for one of them. (And of course "www." and ".com" are merely frequently occurring, and by no means fixed.)
Four, these days, the "@" in an email address is no more an abbreviation for "at" than the "/" in an URL is an abbreviation for "slash".
Finally, what you're really saying is that you're in favor of hieroglyphs. You're willing to trade in a word made up from parts used elsewhere for a completely new character used specifically in one place. That's not a good trade. You end up with unwieldy encodings, specialized typing heuristics, code sets that need to grow as new words are added to the language, and rock stars that distribute new fonts with their press releases.-- jutta, Jul 27 2000 Watching the library's text-based system reel through the top level domains [ .com; .org; ....] looking for the valid address to match a keyword gives me pause to wonder over the true user-friendliness of the www.-- reensure, Nov 07 2000 User friendliness is not necessarily a good thing where some idiot can annoy millions of people with a spam program...-- StarChaser, Dec 09 2000 random, halfbakery