The most local comes first because the rest is optional. Both in real life (“give that to Peter”) and to some degree for computer network addresses. You can em

The most local comes first because the rest is optional. Both in real life (“give that to Peter”) and to some degree for computer network addresses. You can email ‘peter’ which would be on same machine, ‘peter@arts’ which would be on the ‘arts’ machine on your LAN, or ‘peter@BigCo.com’ which would be on the WAN. The http protocol takes existing domain names and tags on a path. The domain name system was already in place, so if anything had to be reversed, it would need to be the path, but that would be rather problematic.