Morbus Iff wrote:
I just asked two people (my fiancee and my 18 year old sister to be specific) and both told me that a URL is a 'web address'. They didn't knew what a 'path alias' is, and could not place it either. Maybe it's a language thing, but in Belgium the acronym URL is understood by many people and almost as common as 'e-mail' or 'chat'.
Exactly right: a web address. Is "about" a web address? Cos that's what we're asking people to type in, not "http://drupal.org/about".
Incidentally, I'm *not* suggesting that "path alias" is better. Merely that "custom URL" is not it. As I've suggested in the original issue, "URL path" is a combination of both worlds, is accurate semantically, and more importantly, accurate operationally: what the user types in is exactly what the box is asking for (not a "custom URL", but a "URL path", which "about" would be considered).
A couple of observations on the discussion so far:- 1. A few people like the idea of having a UI presentation of the input field of the form: http://www.example.com/base/ [ enter-rest-of-url-here... ]. The only real objection to this is that the form api's don't make this possible. If thats the only real objection then we should create a new form "object" for this type of input style. Saying we can't do it because of the form api is not the way to address usability issues. 2. Wordpress calls the field "post slug" along with a path-auto style prefilled text field. This name has no direction relation to technical meaning of the concept. But, I can find no debate on the Wordpress forums as to its meaning. By divorcing the name from the technical jargon, and auto populating it the appear to have successfully sidestepped the debate. (But the post slug only becomes part of the URL if the permalinks global option is configured to use it). David