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Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Thin
by downerending 7y ago
Perhaps ironically, URLs were never meant for human consumption in the first place. You were meant to "travel" to various sites via search indices, etc. (Think Google.)
Viewed in that light, restricting DNS names to ASCII as a way to reduce bugs, security issues, etc., makes a lot of sense.
- ncmncm 7y agoSearch engines happened remarkably late. Nobody understood how easy search engines would be. People thought you would follow links from directory pages linked from your "home page", hence the house symbol still seen in browsers. Yahoo! is a leftover of an attempt at a directory.
- downerending 7y agoIndeed--this is what was meant by "indices". It's kind of like XML. It was never meant to be seen by human eyes, except in a few debugging scenarios. Unfortunately, that intention was ignored, and now we have a usability disaster. (At least in the case of XML, it can just die.)
- lokedhs 7y agoI agree with what you said about XML. But in its stead we have a lot of JSON which is several respects is even worse. The worst part of it is that it doesn't have a stable definition for numbers, making it impossible to guarantee you're getting the same value back if you encode and then decode a number. Reliably preserving the data you serialise using it should be a primary feature for an encoding format. JSON can't even do that.
- gowld 7y agoWhy do you need a stable serialization for an unstable data type? Use a string of you want stability.
- lokedhs 7y agoThe point is that a 64-bit integer is stable in the language I'm using (which is most languages). My opinion is that a serialisation format that explicitly makes something as fundamental as the representation of numbers unspecified is not useful as a data representation format.
- LadyCailin 7y agoOh man, do you remember aol keywords?
- downerending 7y agoAnd who can forget the original "me too"? :-)
- johnchristopher 7y ago> You were meant to "travel" You were meant to surf the web ^^.
- johannes1234321 7y ago"Surfing" came later afair it's traced back to some Australian librarian who had a surf board on here mousepad while looking for an analogy for an article she wrote. [Citation needed]
- WorldMaker 7y agoIt's another reminder how much internet infrastructure predates the Unicode standard (along with other equally wacky hacks like email's UTF-7). URLs weren't restricted to ASCII versus Unicode for any sort of bug reduction/security issue/whatnot, they were restricted to (a subset of) ASCII simply because Unicode did not exist at the time to even be considered.
- gowld 7y agoUnicode (1987-1991) predates URLs (1990-1994) but not DNS (1983)
- WorldMaker 7y agoThe most critical Unicode date for this sort of discussion is the standardization of UTF-8 (1993), because HTTP (1989) piggy-backed on Telnet (1969), an 8-bit text channel.
- johannes1234321 7y agoI won't judge URLs, but we are talking about DNS and hostnames here, which predate URLs and we're ment to give human-readable names to hosts.
- gowld 7y agoCitation needed that URLs were never meant to be seen. Every web browser had a location bar.