Actually, the one main benefit is that they can be parsed as URLs, both visually and by things like email programs. Compare:<p>"For the latest blog post, just head to elliottkember."<p>"For the latest blog post, just head to <a href="http://elliottkember.com" rel="nofollow">http://elliottkember.com</a><p>The first one makes no sense, while the second is obviously talking about a web URL. I'm sure there are other ways to make this work, but this author's post feels like a solution in search of a problem. At the very least, it's hardly "madness".
A good .com domain is already very hard to get. Let's not overvalue them any more than they already are by giving them even more advantages over the other tlds.
Someone who highlights words and phrases in four different colors for various kinds of emphasis is lecturing the world about <i>unnecessary</i> signifiers?
This is kind of funny coming from a global perspective. I'm a South African who has worked in Europe. In the Netherlands ALL the websites have a .nl domain. In Switzerland it's all .chf. In South Africa it's all .co.za. If someone referred to just justsomewebsite/somepage, I would be pretty confused as to which domain it belongs to, especially as I have Google Chrome installed which defaults all my pages to have a .nl domain if I don't enter it.
Explicit is better than implicit. The semantic web will require, more than ever, that we specify exactly what our data represents, rather than leaving the interpretation to humans.
Break the syntactic rules of a URL by having, essentially, an optional TLD and it'll just make things harder for people who are online, but don't quite get it (eg, my dad, etc)
It's like the "www." discussion. URLs exist for a reason someone vocal may or may not understand. He only uses http URLs and .com domains, but I regularly use git://, svn:// and even faked a couple URL styles for my own use that I felt I could easily parse.
Two things bothered me about this page:<p>#1 - The highlighting is too much and a bit ridiculous - to the point of being counterproductive.<p>#2 - The little page peel thing is pretty neat but the HTML behind it isn't the source of the page. Geeky complaint, I know.
<a href="http://" rel="nofollow">http://</a> and .com are madness along the lines of _The Inmates are Running the Asylum_. If you step back for a moment, isn't it strange that abbreviations of protocols and double-slash separators are presented to the naive end-user?<p>Maybe AOL keywords were before their time, but I don't understand why something like a Book Title can't be used for the 1st part of the URL.