[Usability] Exposing Paths to normal users?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2006 11:28:16 -0500
> From: Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>
> To: Evandro Fernandes Giovanini <efgiovanini gmail com>
> Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Sorry State [Was: NLD10 and GNOME]

... <snip>  [Huge discussion from Desktop Devel] [1]

> There _is_ a default audience if a project doesn't find a way to choose
> one deliberately, and it's what I've called "by and for developers." If
> there's no way to stay out of that gravity, it's better to embrace it
> wholeheartedly IMO than to be there de facto and keep poking developers
> in the eye. e.g. whether to expose paths in the UI; if most of your
> users are shell users, GNOME probably made the wrong call.

Which do you think was the wrong call, hiding paths from users or showing
them?  It is not entirely clear to me from your message

Paths are okay for Experienced shell users are obviously familiar with
paths but most users are familiar with web browser and the location URIs
are another form of paths.

I believe the "bread crumbs" idea in the GTK File Chooser and more
recently in Nautilus was an interesting experiment but a bad idea because
web browsing forces us to educate users about paths and URIs, and maybe
eventually encourage them to learn about the shell and script some of the
more tedious tasks.

I hope you can spare a few moments to write even a short reply.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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[1] Message by Havoc Pennington in full but not really relevant to the
specific questions asked above:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00174.html