Q:

Enhancing web addresses as displayed in a browser location input

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.?

download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups
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.

A:

I reckon something like this would be a great feature and clearly a better way navigating history.
Coda does something very similar to your proposal:

And ditto for your anchors proposal:

There could be some issues as high-level (left) selection may not resolve to a valid URL, but I can clearly see the benefit where resolution is possible.

