Back in the early 80s, UUCP formatted addresses such as bigvax!foobox!user where more common than user@box.network.
How domains became backwards
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: How domains became backwards
#22So did URL get designed backwards then? Should we have cerf@example.com instead of example.com/~cerf?
id=5236146?item@news.ycombinator.com maybe?
Re: How domains became backwards
#23The UK "Grey Book" email system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols ) used email addresses the other way around (in the same timeframe that the UK was using a stack over X.25 as their internetworking protocol). For example, a user at Imperial College (IC) would have been: user@uk.ac.ic, rather than user@ic.ac.uk as they might today. Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, b…
I wondered why the article didn't mention JANet-style addressing, or UUCP-style bang-paths, both of which lead to more specific elements on the right. With the rise of NAT-traversal technologies, I find it a little disappointing that bang-path addressing hasn't been rediscovered and used with TURN.
Honestly I find it comforting that people who think that the solution to inconvenient addressing problems is more and different syntax haven't won the argument. :)
Re: How domains became backwards
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Numeric notation is built right to left. To count up from 1 to 9 uses single digits, of course. Then to go from 9 to 10, the ones place increments and rolls over, and we add the new tens digit on the left, not the right.
Not sure, the numeric notation is little endian wheras DNSs are big endian.
That's the point. Numeric notation is right-to-left. It was around long before the concept of endianness.
Re: How domains became backwards
#25Java Developers staring at com.domain.specific namespaces are somewhat preconditioned to examining this discrepancy.
Re: How domains became backwards
#26When domain names were first used, there was no such thing as a URL. The end.
Re: How domains became backwards
#27"This was basically maintained in one giant text file managed by one organisation."
Actually it was managed by one guy! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel
Re: How domains became backwards
#28The UK "Grey Book" email system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols ) used email addresses the other way around (in the same timeframe that the UK was using a stack over X.25 as their internetworking protocol). For example, a user at Imperial College (IC) would have been: user@uk.ac.ic, rather than user@ic.ac.uk as they might today. Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, b…
I wondered why the article didn't mention JANet-style addressing, or UUCP-style bang-paths, both of which lead to more specific elements on the right. With the rise of NAT-traversal technologies, I find it a little disappointing that bang-path addressing hasn't been rediscovered and used with TURN.
Indeed .. because the article was under-researched drivel.
Re: How domains became backwards
#29Group hierarchies on USENET were from least to most specific, for example sci.math.num-analysis.
There are good reasons for both of these choices. USENET was a taxonomy, at least in principle, although like any taxonomy of thought you ran into cases like sci.foo.bar and alt.foo.bar fairly often. A taxonomy should be read from general to specific. Email addresses are addresses. The metaphor is a geography, which goes from the specific to the general. Then we have URLS, which go from the specific to the general, h…
Addresses goes from specific to general mostly in countries influenced by British empire. Because international standard require to put city and country at the end, many countries have addresses with mixed order: street, home number, apartment number, city, country.
Re: How domains became backwards
#30Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they would be backwards: com.twitter@holysee --- By the way, this must be a mistake: This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers of these systems
That language is math . Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.
Not true, but close enough.
Even in Arabic, numbers are the exception, written from left to write.
انا من مواليد ١٩٨٦. I was born in 1986.
You will notice the number sequencing, although slightly different looking, is the same as in Western orthography. Why? Arabs took their numbering system from the Indians, and adapted it.