
A URL field pre-filled with a http:// which doesnt disappear on focus is bad UI - barredo
http://log.valhallaisland.com/post/705883184
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petercooper
_No one types out URLs_

An unfounded assumption. I type out URLs quite often on things like blog
comments or when creating accounts on new webapps. I'm not sure why I'd go to
my own Web site or Twitter page and copy/paste the URL when I can type it a
lot quicker.

Further, you don't have to "delete" the existing "<http://> when pasting. Just
double click in the field to have all the text selected, then paste. It
_replaces_ the existing contents. Adds the time it takes to do a double click
or press Ctrl/Cmd+A.

The problem with UI suggestions is that even when they're logical and seem to
make sense, they won't for everybody - especially not those who've become so
used to working around the problem, that a "solution" could expend more mental
effort than following how everyone else does it already.

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btilly
It is a pretty safe guess that you don't use Linux.

There, selecting the text _automatically_ copies it, so when you paste you
just paste back the text you just highlighted.

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petercooper
Maybe it does on your flavor of Linux but I gave it a try in Ubuntu and get
the expected behavior (as on OS X and Windows). I even recorded the session
and put it on YouTube: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZl3gTzqyKA>

I used right click menu paste for the first run merely to show you what I was
doing. I used Ctrl+V later on and got the same result.

~~~
planckscnst
Something's fishy here. At the very end you highlight the text field, but then
you paste into it and something else (not what was just highlighted) goes in.
The only time I have ever seen highlighting automatically get stuck into the
clipboard (rather than the primary buffer) is when something like Glipper,
Klipper, or Parcellite is screwing things up.

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petercooper
At 0:18, I Ctrl+C the word "google" as selected below. At 0:20, I paste the
word "google" replacing the full URL showing in the search box. After that, I
do nothing interesting beyond randomly select the URL (but I do nothing with
it) - I just didn't cut the end off :-)

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jay_kyburz
You know what is bad ui though, have an image of a ui element and make it a
hyper link so that when you click on it you are taken away from the page you
are reading to a page containing only the image.

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Zak
I think the best thing to do is check the URL server-side. If it doesn't
contain a protocol, add <http://>, otherwise keep the supplied protocol.

~~~
erydo
The protocol tells the browser which port to connect to on the server. That
can't be done server-side.

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igrekel
I hate to be nitpicking but the protocol, while related to the port is still a
separate thing. For example, using a url of the type ftp:// is much more than
just switching to port 23, even worse a url of the type file:// is not bound
to a port as far as I know. Switching protocols mean the actual exhange is
completely different.

You can actually use the http protocol on ports other than 80 and its actually
commonly done on local development servers where anything like 8080, 8000,
8090 or many others are frquently used. In such a case the url would be
something like <http://myserver.com:8080/blabla> where 8080 would be the port.
The confusion might arise because protocols have a default port associated
with them. Sorry for the explanation of something thats probably waaaay too
simple for most of the readers but that comment was just so wrong for me.

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erydo
Yep, you're absolutely right. I was making overly broad strokes.

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_delirium
This frequently bites me when using archive.org's wayback machine. I usually
use it to retrieve a page that I found a link to that now appears to be down,
so I almost exclusively copy/paste there, and almost always get as my first
result something like, _0 pages found
for<http://http:/www.archive.org/index.php*> _

At the very least, if you _are_ going to have that as your UI, it'd be nice if
the server would notice and strip the doubled http prefix.

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samps
Alternatively: detect when a URL is pasted and remove the placeholder
<http://> only then. I certainly type URLs sometimes and would find it
disorienting if the <http://> just disappeared when I started typing.

~~~
glhaynes
But how would I know it's going to do that? I'm gonna delete the <http://> if
I've already got an <http://> on the clipboard because I can't be sure it
behaves unlike every other text box I'm used to using.

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jacobbijani
Thanks, I'll think about it. I'm pretty sure we do add the "<http://> if you
forget it, but we don't strip duplicate protocols out. I can check for that as
well.

"Terrible" might be a bit far, though.

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robotron
... just use "placeholder" in HTML5. Problem solved.

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fookyong
case-by-case, angry young Padawan.

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detcader
Tumblr is horrible with this. If you want to set a click-through link for a
new photo post, it's usually click-[ctrl a]-backspace-[ctrl v] as a click-
through link is really never typed out, but is most likely pre-existing.

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spicyj
You know, you can skip the backspace; pasting something with a selection will
replace the selected text with whatever's on the pasteboard (at least on all
the systems I've had experience with).

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detcader
Not the case here.. in Chrome on Linux in /new/photo clicking the box after
clicking "Set a click-through link" highlights either nothing or the last '/'.

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spicyj
I said you can skip the backspace, not the Ctrl-A.

