On: Google adds experimental setting to hide full URLs...

[Mirioron]

>And probably some clever logic to deal with the randomforum.php?fid=12345&tpcid=984.3&page=5 goop that is still all-too-common... :/

You say that as though websites like that are random small sites. HN has that kind of a URL, so do YouTube and Google.

[Wowfunhappy → Mirioron]

Hacker News doesn't have breadcrumbs either. The concept of a directory hierarchy inherently doesn't fit.

You could try to map the parent ==> child relationship of every individual post URL, which might be cool, but think about how long the URLs would get.

For sites with breadcrumbs though, the URL absolutely should follow the crumbs (and I've argued for such at my company).