
Using http:// and .com is madness - madmotive
http://elliottkember.com/madness
======
ryanwaggoner
Actually, the one main benefit is that they can be parsed as URLs, both
visually and by things like email programs. Compare:

"For the latest blog post, just head to elliottkember."

"For the latest blog post, just head to <http://elliottkember.com>

The first one makes no sense, while the second is obviously talking about a
web URL. I'm sure there are other ways to make this work, but this author's
post feels like a solution in search of a problem. At the very least, it's
hardly "madness".

~~~
aneesh
I remember a psychology study that showed people recognize www.yahoo.com as a
url more quickly than yahoo.com -- with the latter, you don't see the ".com"
until you get to the end of the phrase, and that's when you realize it's a
url. I can only imagine that getting rid of the .com would make things even
worse.

~~~
marcus
That is because of psychological mechanism called Priming, basically an
earlier input can affect your perception of a later input.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)>

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chaosmachine
A good .com domain is already very hard to get. Let's not overvalue them any
more than they already are by giving them even more advantages over the other
tlds.

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helium
This is kind of funny coming from a global perspective. I'm a South African
who has worked in Europe. In the Netherlands ALL the websites have a .nl
domain. In Switzerland it's all .chf. In South Africa it's all .co.za. If
someone referred to just justsomewebsite/somepage, I would be pretty confused
as to which domain it belongs to, especially as I have Google Chrome installed
which defaults all my pages to have a .nl domain if I don't enter it.

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swombat
Non-issue, pointless to discuss.

~~~
dryicerx
It's not pointless to discuss. These are lessons to be learned when new
systems are to be designed. These are things that were not meant for
mainstream usage when they were design. They just caught on. Now it's too
adopted to do anything about it.

Note: Personally URLS should be backwards to make sense..
com.google.mail/sub/folder (go in order of largest authority down to the
smallest subfolder).

At the moments it's

<http://tiny.small.big.bigger/big/small/tiny>

~~~
zacharydanger
Your example of tiny.small.big.bigger is the wrong way to look at it. Instead,
look at it as [http://<unique](http://<unique) host
identifier>/path/to/resource and it makes more sense. tiny.small.big.bigger
isn't even correct since you're trying to map "size" to subdomain level. As if
a subunit with 5 parents can't be larger than a subunit with just 2 parents.

And com.google.mail would mean specifying the least meaningful information
first. Would you rather be introduced to someone as "Widgets Incorporated,
Director of Widgets, John Doe" or "John Doe, Director of Widgets at Widgets
Incorporated".

~~~
dangrover
I agree. If people knew how to read URLs, then phishing scams would no longer
exist.

"Okay, the domain in the URL for this link is X, but I know my bank's domain
is Y, therefore it's a scam."

Part of it is the URL syntax being unintuitive, part of it is simple lack of
proper education/training. But it seems like in the time you tell people
"DON'T CLICK LINKS IN EMAIL OMG", you could just teach them how to read a URL.

Maybe if URLs had spaces and looked a little more like a postal address than a
confusing jumble, people might actually read them. As it stands now, though,
most people just type everything into a search page -- even if they're
actually typing in a URL as a search term. Kind of like that story about the
number one search term on MSN being Google.

~~~
madcaptenor
I actually search for Google every so often, because I get confused about
whether I'm on my home computer (Chrome) or office computer (Firefox).

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Sephr
Sure, because ftp://somewhere.com and <http://somewhere.com> are _always_ the
same website.

~~~
potatolicious
I'm surprised this argument came from someone who touts himself as a skilled
web developer... The use of <http://> is pretty obvious to anyone with even a
rudimentary amount of networking knowledge.

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noamsml
But then how would we know what's a URL and what's not? And how will I
distinguish outside sites from local machines and stuff I set in my hosts
file?

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rbanffy
Can we bury this?

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mcantelon
Explicit is better than implicit. The semantic web will require, more than
ever, that we specify exactly what our data represents, rather than leaving
the interpretation to humans.

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gojomo
Someone who highlights words and phrases in four different colors for various
kinds of emphasis is lecturing the world about _unnecessary_ signifiers?

~~~
silentOpen
He's also looking for an MD5 fixed point. Something is madness but it's not
URL syntax...

~~~
gojomo
My intuition tells me there's a fair chance such a fixed-point exists, if MD5
behaves as a random oracle.

Specifically, there's a 1-in-2^128 chance that any 128-bit input will give
itself as the output. Over 2^128 trials the chance that no input answers
itself would be:

    
    
      (1-(2^-128))^(2^128)
    

...which mAlphaMatica helpfully calculates as...

<http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(1-2^-128)^(2^128)>

    
    
      0.367879441171442321595523770
    

That is, there's about a 63% chance Kember's quest to find an input whose MD5
output is itself will succeed.

Or, is there something in MD5's construction making this impossible, making
the random-oracle model inapplicable?

~~~
silentOpen
Very interesting. I had not worked out or seen the math for this. I don't
doubt that such a number could exist. I do question the speed with which one
could find the number and the utility once it's found.

~~~
madcaptenor
How to find it: do MD5 on some random input. Then do MD5 on that output, and
repeat until it converges. The problem is that you could end up in a cycle,
instead of at a fixed point.

The speed with which it can be found: I'm going to wave my hands and claim
this is in "Analytic Combinatorics" by Flajolet and Sedgewick. Seriously,
though, under the assumptions we've been throwing around here this is a
"random mapping" and these are reasonably well-studied objects.

~~~
gojomo
No need to worry about cycles from using one output as the next input; just
iterate over all possible 128-bit inputs, in any order. Unless you're trying
to leverage some known deviation of MD5 from being a true random oracle, each
input is just as likely as any other to be an identity input.

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amalcon
How would your browser distinguish between, say, www.net and www.net.com? How
about a hypothetical www.net.com.com?

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stevejalim
Break the syntactic rules of a URL by having, essentially, an optional TLD and
it'll just make things harder for people who are online, but don't quite get
it (eg, my dad, etc)

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rbanffy
It's like the "www." discussion. URLs exist for a reason someone vocal may or
may not understand. He only uses http URLs and .com domains, but I regularly
use git://, svn:// and even faked a couple URL styles for my own use that I
felt I could easily parse.

~~~
anigbrowl
Although the intent was comic, the best verbalization I've ever heard (and one
I now use frequently and effectiveively) is 'wuh wuh wuh something dot com'.
Everyone gets it, and for people who hate writing down URLs (because it's
techie and unnatural to them) it gives them a cheap laugh which puts them in a
good mood.

Now that I have made you aware of this, you will be unable to get it out of
your head.

~~~
pam_gamble
I've used, and heard many others use, dub dub dub to verbalize the www at the
beginning of most URLs.

~~~
swombat
Sometimes, I try "triple-u" for comic effect.

Yeah, my jokes suck.

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ssharp
Two things bothered me about this page:

#1 - The highlighting is too much and a bit ridiculous - to the point of being
counterproductive.

#2 - The little page peel thing is pretty neat but the HTML behind it isn't
the source of the page. Geeky complaint, I know.

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stcredzero
<http://> and .com are madness along the lines of _The Inmates are Running the
Asylum_. If you step back for a moment, isn't it strange that abbreviations of
protocols and double-slash separators are presented to the naive end-user?

Maybe AOL keywords were before their time, but I don't understand why
something like a Book Title can't be used for the 1st part of the URL.

~~~
silentOpen
Isn't it strange that telephone numbers are segmented arbitrarily? Weird that
you know what a "country code", "area code", and "exchange" are?

It's not madness. It's topological addressing.

~~~
stcredzero
Telephone numbers are just meant to be somewhat organized line noise. Humans
can just treat it as a big arbitrary blob of data they have to type in. But
domain names are meant to be "human readable" but just look at the mess the
URL makes of them?

Phone numbers were that way because telephone companies had to organize a
hierarchical set of wires that could make physical connections between any two
endpoints with limited relay-driven processing. Packet switched networks are
supposed to abstract away topological addressing for the higher layers. Why
make users type it in? Why, with all of the computing power we have available,
do we make users put in the protocol? Protocol is certainly not relevant to
most users. I've even known CIOs to mess that one up. Why put it in front of
them at all for the default situation?

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pkulak
People are still putting www in front of their URLs. Let's get rid of that
first.

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skwiddor
file://

rtsp://

mailto://

irc:// (if you have chatzilla or similar installed)

~~~
joezydeco
what about gopher:// !!!!

~~~
skwiddor
blimey, I forgot about that, my friend __20h__ will be annoyed considering the
channel I hang out in irc is called #gopher and we promote gopher uri's in the
title!!

