Wirelessly posted (iPhone: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)
Why do we still need to show "http://"?
There's no need to show it, Chrome doesn't in the address bar nor is it obligatory to show it on the text displayed for the link. But for the actual link reference, it needs to be there, otherwise, how does the browser know to use http and not https, ftp, ftps, sftp, telnet, mailto or other protocols to threat the link info ?
Can't it go away like the need for "www"?
There was a need for www ? When was this ? www was never needed. It's just that convention everyone used out of habit. It's just a DNS entry that points to an IP address, it had no special function and still doesn't.
Kids these days do save URLs as bookmarks. Internet/Web Apps are finally starting to take over (and remember that iTunes is one of the best out there). I know so many people that use a Facebook or a Twitter app instead of going to the actual website.
You mean like back in the days when forums were read using an NNTP reader ? Back when chat was done using IRC software ? Back when remotely logging into a server was done over Telnet ?
You mean we're going back to the good old days of the Internet, back when the Web browser was used to browse the web and not to try to be a swiss army knife ?
Goodie.
Unfortunately, you're reading it wrong. Those apps all still use the "URLs" and all the domain name infrastructure. It's just hidden away. Also, all those apps are just very specialized web browsers in a sense, they just don't use hypertext but XML. If things continue to devolve the way they have, soon the entire Internet will exclusively use the HTTP protocol for everything. Heck, in the same vein as XML, we could just rename HTTP for XTP (eXtensible Transfer Protocol) and do away with any pretension of multi-protocol over a network of networks.
