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How the URL Was Built

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Re: How the URL Was Built

#11

Post by pmachinery »

zzo38computer wrote: post #6
anw wrote: post #2

I often wish that the schema around domain names was reversed, to reflect something closer to Usenet. Instead of news.ycombinator.com we would use com.ycombinator.news, similar to how a news group might be rec.arts.punkrock or comp.os.linux. This makes more logical sense to me, as you start from the broadest on the left (tld) and work your way to the most granular part (the path, query, or fragment of the resource).

It might be. Many things that use domain names do reverse them. See [0] and [1] for some examples. For many systems, reversing domain names is better, so that is presumably why they do it, because it makes more sense to do it that way for those systems. (It might also help when indexing anything related to domain names; you will want the broadest part first, so that when you search by prefix, you will find anything i…

What is "Unusenet" supposed to be? All I can find by searching is you casually referring to it here on HN[0], on Wikipedia[1], and on Usenet[2], as if it's actually a thing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849200 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040140

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_Usenet_news...

[2] http://al.howardknight.net/?ID=160223384800

Re: How the URL Was Built

#12

Post by r3dk1ng »

pmachinery wrote: post #11
zzo38computer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be. Many things that use domain names do reverse them. See [0] and [1] for some examples. For many systems, reversing domain names is better, so that is presumably why they do it, because it makes more sense to do it that way for those systems. (It might also help when indexing anything related to domain names; you will want the broadest part first, so that when you search by prefix, you will find anything i…

What is "Unusenet" supposed to be? All I can find by searching is you casually referring to it here on HN[0], on Wikipedia[1], and on Usenet[2], as if it's actually a thing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849200 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040140 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_Usenet_news... [2] http://al.howardknight.net/?ID=160223384800

gopher://zzo38computer.org/0textfile/miscellaneous/unusenet (copied that gopher link's contents into a pastebin) https://pastebin.com/raw/qJhSKGyv

Re: How the URL Was Built

#13

Post by kortex »

That was neat! Next, maybe you could do ones on URNs. They are much rarer in the wild, compared to URLs, but you can find them in torrent magnet files, isbn: numbers, etc.

They are a powerful concept - give a resource a universal name, regardless of how you locate it. I'm surprised this hasn't taken off as a way to universally point to assets (outside bittorrent), but I guess the challenge there is the resolver, and the lack of a pressing need when URLs do most of what you want.

I just want a way to refer to a file that might be local, http, s3, what-have-you, and always refer to it with the same string, regardless of where it's located.

There's XRIs, but there's, erm, some drama going on there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Resource_Identifi...

Re: How the URL Was Built

#14

Post by account42 »

kovek wrote: post #4

Is there a character to demark the end of a url? If I write into my smartphone notes a url, I prefer to write something like: Http://google.com/search?q=How to bake cakes$ Than Http://google.com/search?q=How+to+bake+cakes iOS Notes treats the second one as a URL and the first one partially as a URL

URLs can't contain spaces

Re: How the URL Was Built

#15

Post by gumby »

> we use the two words “Internet” and “Web” synonymously.

"We" do? Especially so-called tech blogs like the one that hosts this article?

Re: How the URL Was Built

#16

Post by gumby »

account42 wrote: post #14
kovek wrote: post #4

Is there a character to demark the end of a url? If I write into my smartphone notes a url, I prefer to write something like: Http://google.com/search?q=How to bake cakes$ Than Http://google.com/search?q=How+to+bake+cakes iOS Notes treats the second one as a URL and the first one partially as a URL

URLs can't contain spaces

Actually they can, though it is not recommended as URLs appear in running text, which may break lines at space characters. Just look at appendices A and B of RFC 3986.

Although it's recommended that you encode them in user representation (for this reason) you can certainly should be able to send a space character through at the protocol level and if not it's a bug.

Note that a space is not valid in the host name portion if you are using DNS (which most URLs do, of course).

Re: How the URL Was Built

#17

Post by yencabulator »

kovek wrote: post #4

Is there a character to demark the end of a url? If I write into my smartphone notes a url, I prefer to write something like: Http://google.com/search?q=How to bake cakes$ Than Http://google.com/search?q=How+to+bake+cakes iOS Notes treats the second one as a URL and the first one partially as a URL

An old convention is http://google.com/search?q=How+to+bake+cakes>. Really helps with ending periods.

Markdown copied that too: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.29/#autolink

Re: How the URL Was Built

#18

Post by dublin »

anw wrote: post #2

I often wish that the schema around domain names was reversed, to reflect something closer to Usenet. Instead of news.ycombinator.com we would use com.ycombinator.news, similar to how a news group might be rec.arts.punkrock or comp.os.linux. This makes more logical sense to me, as you start from the broadest on the left (tld) and work your way to the most granular part (the path, query, or fragment of the resource).

In opposition to both the article and the comment above, Usenet (actually uucp) bang-paths are VERY different from domain names, in that they don't represent any kind of organizational (in this case, naming) hierarchy at all, but rather a source-routed path of how to get there. For instance, a uucp email address might look like:

well-known-host!next-host!third-host!fourth-host!mailhost!username

(another syntax for the last 2 nodes above might be username@mailhost, depending - this became popular later on...)

Although this might work just as well: well-known-host!other-host!mailserverhost!username

Note that each hostname in such an address is a short, local hostname, not an FQDN. As shown, the first host was usually a "well-known" host in the uucp world, something like say, ucbvax. While uucp addresses were sometimes rewritten (some intermediate hosts tended to get hammered, and remember, this was back when bits weren't free), this was frowned upon for obvious reasons.

Re: How the URL Was Built

#19

Post by justforyou »

"The www part of the domain identifies the address as a website. We merely use it because of historical convention. Back then, a single server served multiple purposes, the www indicated that a particular subdomain of the server was for website hosting. This is no longer true because we now have dedicated web servers."

Inaccurate.

Re: How the URL Was Built

#20

Post by pmachinery »

r3dk1ng wrote: post #12
pmachinery wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "Unusenet" supposed to be? All I can find by searching is you casually referring to it here on HN[0], on Wikipedia[1], and on Usenet[2], as if it's actually a thing. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21849200 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22040140 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Comparison_of_Usenet_news... [2] http://al.howardknight.net/?ID=160223384800

gopher://zzo38computer.org/0textfile/miscellaneous/unusenet (copied that gopher link's contents into a pastebin) https://pastebin.com/raw/qJhSKGyv

Thanks. Interesting, though I'm not exactly sure what problem it's solving or what improvement it's making to Usenet.
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