Web addresses (URL, URI, IRI …) are composed of hierarchical data of several kinds. They are mostly treated as plain text, but browsers have started to highlight certain parts (the domains) and hide others (e.g. the “protocol” prefix) in their location bar. When selecting it, activating edit mode, it becomes plain text though, unlike formulas in recent spreadsheet applications or some templates in OS settings.
How would it affect the overall user experience if browsers used their browsing history or deeper knowledge about the address structure to populate dropdown menus or something similar for the parts of an address? Is it very different for local file paths in Finder, Explorer etc.?
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One could also display key-value pairs after ?
in a more friendly way, e.g. line by line, and highlight the fragment part after #
which could also show a list of all anchors/IDs in the open document.