4 ms·

It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant enough for the foreseeable future of the Internet. The human brain just isn'

by p1mrx 5y ago

It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant enough for the foreseeable future of the Internet. The human brain just isn't capable of dealing with numbers on that scale, which is why we invented computers in the first place.

elric 5y ago
> It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant Not really. In fact, pretty much anything would have been easier to memorize than this colon-separated nonsense, which makes URL parsing more difficult, and which is so stupidly complex that it has a special syntax to ignore repeating zeros.
- ikiris 5y ago
  you're free to use the entire 128 bit number, or the older dotted decimal notation.
- p1mrx 5y ago
  An IP address is fundamentally a 32-bit or 128-bit binary number, and hexadecimal is the most human-friendly base to represent those. Decimal gets pretty hairy once you introduce CIDR prefixes that aren't 8-bit aligned. The [IPv6]:port syntax is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what they'd have done instead. Dotted hexadecimal would be ambiguous, because "1.2.3.4.5.6.beef.de" looks like a DNS hostname. Zero compression exists because it's more convenient than writing all those zeroes, especially with CIDR prefixes like "2000::/3".
  - laurensr 5y ago
    I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port. Note that they can even distinguish octal and decimal IPs, for example this is working in Chrome, Firefox and the Windows ping utility: http://0100.0351.0251.0152/ http://0100.0351.0251.0152/ As well as decimal: http://1089055082/ http://1089055082/ Both lead to google.com
    - p1mrx 5y ago
      > I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port. Except for recent versions of Firefox Mobile: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4343 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4343

by p1mrx 5y ago

elric 5y ago

> It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant Not really. In fact, pretty much anything would have been easier to memorize than this colon-separated nonsense, which makes URL parsing more difficult, and which is so stupidly complex that it has a special syntax to ignore repeating zeros.

ikiris 5y ago
you're free to use the entire 128 bit number, or the older dotted decimal notation.
p1mrx 5y ago
An IP address is fundamentally a 32-bit or 128-bit binary number, and hexadecimal is the most human-friendly base to represent those. Decimal gets pretty hairy once you introduce CIDR prefixes that aren't 8-bit aligned. The [IPv6]:port syntax is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what they'd have done instead. Dotted hexadecimal would be ambiguous, because "1.2.3.4.5.6.beef.de" looks like a DNS hostname. Zero compression exists because it's more convenient than writing all those zeroes, especially with CIDR prefixes like "2000::/3".
- laurensr 5y ago
  I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port. Note that they can even distinguish octal and decimal IPs, for example this is working in Chrome, Firefox and the Windows ping utility: http://0100.0351.0251.0152/ http://0100.0351.0251.0152/ As well as decimal: http://1089055082/ http://1089055082/ Both lead to google.com
  - p1mrx 5y ago
    > I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port. Except for recent versions of Firefox Mobile: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4343 https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4343