[drupal-devel] reviews needed

[David Angier]

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