Live data from Hacker News

An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

welcometothejungle.com

1–10 of 25 posts

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#3
This was my favorite Q & A:

> Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain— welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher. And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-Lee proposed that domain/host/path—that is, com/welcometothejungle/en/collections/behindthecode—would be a better design. What are your feelings about that?

> I designed it this way for autocomplete. My vision at the time was that people would want to do autocomplete or they might want to just type part of the domain name and have it completed in a search list of the local environment. So it would not make sense to have the country code first. It had to be the least-significant part if you’re going to have any kind of reasonable search list or autocomplete. Imagine if we were to type “com.” and then wait for autocomplete. Out of 160 million choices, there would be a pretty long pull-down menu. So in the absence of any agreement or, in my view, cogent arguments about why the other way around made more sense, I did it that way.

This guy is my hero.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#6

This was my favorite Q & A: > Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain— welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher. And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-Lee proposed that domain/h…

I wonder if he considered that even under a domain/host/path format, an autocomplete could probably be designed to ignore the domain and search the host.

Eg, if you're searching for com/welcometothejungle/en/collections/behindthecode, just start typing "welcometothejungle" and autocomplete will find that substring and return the full URL.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#7
So I have the pleasure of calling Paul a friend. One of the most interesting and insightful things he has said in a conversation about the creation of DNS to me was "if those above me had understood the importance of what we where doing it would have never happened and the project would never have been given to someone like me at my level at the time...". It is not clear he understood it at the time himself. He is a pretty nice guy. I (a networking geek that just took this cool stuff and built with it) cannot claim to have done anything special on this journey to arrive where we are today, but I have been privileged enough to know a few of the players and I can say everyone one of them while having their own arrogance, it is never misplaced and in general they just wanted to solve a problem and make stuff work better. I struggle to see that level of idealism in today's tech crowd.

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#9
post #8
post #5

Regarding DNSSEC adoption, for US names: it's less than 2%, just in terms of raw signed domains. It's lower if you're looking at adoption among popular domains.

Source, as of 2020?

dnssec-tools. (Or, for popular zones, any list of popular domains and "host -t ds").

Re: An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS

#10
post #5

Regarding DNSSEC adoption, for US names: it's less than 2%, just in terms of raw signed domains. It's lower if you're looking at adoption among popular domains.

The article claims it’s about 50% globally. So if, as you say, the US only has 2%, is that an argument against DNSSEC? That an argumentum ad populum.
Post reply on HN