Success Quote by Jesse James Garrett

In a web culture that treats links like plumbing, Garrett is trying to make you notice the label on the pipe. URLs may be universal in the sense that they work everywhere, but his provocation is that we’ve trained ourselves to see them as purely technical coordinates: something you click, not something you read. That’s a business-minded reframing with real bite, because it shifts URLs from the domain of infrastructure (IT’s problem) into brand, trust, and user experience (everyone’s problem).

The intent is quietly corrective. By calling URLs “communication tools,” he’s arguing that every link carries a message about what a site is, how it’s organized, and whether it respects the person using it. A clean, human-readable URL signals competence and transparency; a messy parameter soup signals indifference, fragility, even a whiff of sketchiness. The subtext: organizations spend fortunes on marketing copy while letting their most repeated micro-copy - the link itself - be generated by accident.

Context matters here: Garrett is associated with user experience thinking, where small interface choices have outsized effects. He’s speaking to a moment when the web was maturing from a developer playground into a mainstream medium, and the stakes of being legible - to humans, not just machines - were rising. A URL isn’t only an address; it’s a promise, a map, and sometimes evidence. Treat it like communication and you design for sharing, memorability, and trust. Treat it like mere routing and you leak meaning at the exact point people decide whether to click, cite, or bail.