If you tell a user to look for something in library > app support they'll come back and say they can't find it...
...If I tell them to look in ~/Library/"Application Support", they may still not find it, but at least they won't have to autocorrect my input as well as their understanding.
I think you're overlooking something, however. If I tell a user to look for something in
Hard Drive >
Users >
Username >
Library >
Application Support, telling them to substitute their own hard drive and user names for the italicized entries, I am in fact providing an accurate description of its location within the filesystem. Want proof? Just navigate to that location in a Finder window with the Path Bar enabled. On my machine, I see
this.
Obviously an arrow-delineated
path will be regarded as gibberish by Terminal or Finder's
Go menu ->
Go to Folder… command, but I think we're mistaken if we think everyone who seeks our help brings a formal understanding of
path to the discussion. A
path is a kind of flat abstraction of a visible location in GUI space; the latter is one of the factors which allowed so many folks to be comfortable with Macs in the first place, and it's what a lot of them understand.
In the visual space navigated using Finder (more so in the pre-OS X world, perhaps, but still very much the case for many users now), the arrow-delineated navigational instruction I provided an example of above is the very picture of clarity. It just isn't an instruction that
the operating system itself understands.
In deniro's case, it might have been just as useful to accept the obvious
logical clarity of
his preferred taxonomy, and simply point out that the slashes should be replaced with arrows to avoid confusion with the UNIX filepath that the slashes imply.
