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Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

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Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#31

Post by jacquesm »

tokenadult wrote: post #6
jacquesm wrote: post #3

This is widely considered to be a mistake.

This is widely considered to be a mistake. Citations, please? I've been able to deal with it over the years.

Someone above posted the interview with Tim Berners-Lee, I take it that's citation enough ?

The relevant quote:

"Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?

I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary."

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#32

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #7
anigbrowl wrote: post #2

For the same reason your address doesn't go 'USA, California, San Jose, 1297 Fray way'.

Bad analogy: email: georgex@somedomain.sometld www: http://somedomain.sometld/~georgex/ real life: George Xandros 553 Sunset Blvd 12322 San Jose USA So, the web is mixed up, and the other two are 'backwards'. None of them get it in the most logical way. Same with dates: 2002.10.09 vs 09.10.2002 or 10.09.2002 It's all about conventions, what we're used to, so to say 'the same reason' is calling upon a reason that you…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#35

Post by vidarh »

sammcd wrote: post #20

Interview with Tim Berners-Lee where he says he regrets this: http://www.impactlab.com/2006/03/25/interview-with-tim-berne... Looking at what he accomplished, I forgive him.

If he had done that it would've been massively confusing, given that domain names would still be the current ordering for everything else (e-mail etc.).

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#36

Post by vidarh »

jacquesm wrote: post #31
tokenadult wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is widely considered to be a mistake. Citations, please? I've been able to deal with it over the years.

Someone above posted the interview with Tim Berners-Lee, I take it that's citation enough ? The relevant quote: "Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance? I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read:…

He didn't invent domain names. He invented the web. So, no, it's not citation enough.

Also, given that domain names were already in the current order, if he'd put it in reverse order for the web, it'd be far worse than what we have now, which at least is consistent across different types of services.

EDIT: I guess you could argue it's citation enough if we assume, based on his examples, that the original question refers only to web usage.

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#37

Post by jacquesm »

vidarh wrote: post #36
jacquesm wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone above posted the interview with Tim Berners-Lee, I take it that's citation enough ? The relevant quote: "Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance? I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read:…

He didn't invent domain names. He invented the web. So, no, it's not citation enough. Also, given that domain names were already in the current order, if he'd put it in reverse order for the web, it'd be far worse than what we have now, which at least is consistent across different types of services. EDIT: I guess you could argue it's citation enough if we assume, based on his examples, that the original question ref…

I figured Tim Berners-Lee is in an excellent position to criticize not only his own work, but also the more general case of the domain name system.

Obviously if he had done it the other way around in URLs then that would have been a fairly strong point of critique against the DNS, the fact that he would have in retrospect been better of to choose the alternative in spite of creating two different systems makes that critique even stronger.

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#38

Post by gojomo »

Why? Independent invention of the domain name system, and the URL-path system, at different times by different people.

URL-inventors did not think it important enough to break the already-established convention for domain names to acheive hierarchical ordering consistency. With hindsight, nearly 20 years later, it might seem that it would have been worth the nonstandard novelty, but I still wouldn't be so sure.

Consistency with telnet and email was very important for early URL comprehension and adoption among technical folk. And, the reversal-of-ordering corresponds with an important threshold in URL-resolution, from one system (network-layer and owned-domains in a collaborative framework) to another (a single hostname's internal organization, usually under a unified authority). That signification can be helpful even if it's hard to explain why. (The same goes for seemingly arbitrary, path-dependent choices in natural language grammars that nonetheless dominate logically-designed synthetic languages.)

It's easy enough for specialized applications to adopt a reversed form; junklight mentions the 'SURT' form used by my project, Heritrix, which reorders a URI internally for certain scoping/sorting/policy-decision purposes as:

  http://(com,example,www,)/path/to/the/resource
(joshu's proposed move of the port/protocol to 'between' the host and path also has a strong puff of logic about it. I think Google, in their BigTable URI-keys, tends to reverse domain-segments and put the protocol/port later.)

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#39

Post by cduan »

jws wrote: post #15

I think it comes down to history. Host names existed before domain names. When domains were bolted on they used the idea of a default domain for each host and that made sense to be on the end. Consider: telnet hosta # established way telnet hosta.abc # domain bolted on back telnet abc.hosta # domain bolted on front Since people knew the host names and were used to dealing with them, the suffix was more natural since…

This seems pretty much right based on the historical data.

It doesn't seem like ordering of domain name parts was given much thought. RFC 882, which first defined the domain name space, said only this:

By convention, the labels that compose a domain name are read left to right, from the most specific (lowest) to the least specific (highest).

Additionally, it seems that when the first TLD was defined, .arpa, some people were hacking to support it by just concatenating .arpa to the end of all the domain names. Concatenation, of course, is much easier than prepending when you are programming in C. Note the following from RFC 881, which described the transition to using domain names, at a time when the domain name mapping was all stored in HOSTS.TXT files:

So far, no new domains have been introduced. Only a table with all the entries having official names in the ARPA domain has been provided. This should allow programs to be constructed to deal with domain style names in a general way without any special hacks to add or delete the string ".ARPA" to or from host names.

Re: Ask HN: why are domain names reversely ordered?

#40

Post by [deleted] »

etherealG wrote: post #28
riobard wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what is in my mind! The mismatch of domain name order and path order really bothers me for a while and I just couldn't find a sound reason for that. For the date format, AFAIK, only English speaking countries use MM/DD/YY, possibly due to the same order in plain writing style, e.g. October 17, 2009. This is completely insane for virtually other parts of the world because logically it's either YY/MM/DD…

actually, only USA does the rediculous MM/DD/YY. the UK is DD/MM/YY

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