
How domains became backwards - advisedwang
http://david.newgas.net/how-domains-became-backwards/
======
jbert
The UK "Grey Book" email system
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coloured_Book_protocols>) used email addresses
the other way around (in the same timeframe that the UK was using a stack over
X.25 as their internetworking protocol).

For example, a user at Imperial College (IC) would have been: user@uk.ac.ic,
rather than user@ic.ac.uk as they might today.

Email gateways existed to convert between the different systems, but when all
country codes were added to the internet, some addresses were simply
ambiguous. (An address ending in .cs might be either czechoslavakia or a
computer science department.)

The main email software responsible for this slicing and dicing was known as
PP, which helps explain the excellent quote on ASR (alt.sysadmin.recovery) a
few years later:

<http://home.xnet.com/~raven/Sysadmin/ASR.Quotes.html> [search page for "mail
transfer agents"]

~~~
_mhp_
I wondered why the article didn't mention JANet-style addressing, or UUCP-
style bang-paths, both of which lead to more specific elements on the right.

With the rise of NAT-traversal technologies, I find it a little disappointing
that bang-path addressing hasn't been rediscovered and used with TURN.

~~~
ajross
Honestly I find it comforting that people who think that the solution to
inconvenient addressing problems is _more and different syntax_ haven't won
the argument. :)

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codev
JANET (the UK university network) had a NRS (Name Registration Service -
similar to DNS) that worked from least-to-most specific. So Cambridge was
uk.ac.cam instead of today's cam.ac.uk. There were gateways to talk to email
servers on ARPANET and reverse the ordering - there's more on it here:

<http://www.uknof.com/uknof7/Reid-History.pdf>

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wazoox
Back in the early 80s, UUCP formatted addresses such as _bigvax!foobox!user_
where more common than user@box.network.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP>

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opminion
Funny to think that if Twitter handles were fragments of email addresses they
would be backwards:

com.twitter@holysee

\---

By the way, this must be a mistake:

 _This is a clearly a byproduct of the right-to-left language of the designers
of these systems_

~~~
DLWormwood
That language is _math_. Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by
Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

~~~
andrewcooke
that sounds interesting, but i'm having a hard time getting my head round it.
can you give an example where math is right to left?

[edit oh, numbers! thanks! i was thinking about algebra.]

~~~
T-hawk
Numeric notation is built right to left. To count up from 1 to 9 uses single
digits, of course. Then to go from 9 to 10, the ones place increments and
rolls over, and we add the new tens digit on the left, not the right.

~~~
bnegreve
Not sure, the numeric notation is little endian wheras DNSs are big endian.

~~~
B-Con
That's the point. Numeric notation is right-to-left. It was around long before
the concept of endianness.

~~~
bnegreve
What does it mean to be right-to-left? If it means that least significant
values are on the right side and most significant ones on the left side, then
domain names are left-to-right (as opposed to numeric notation).

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spindritf
Group hierarchies on USENET were from least to most specific, for example
sci.math.num-analysis.

~~~
samatman
There are good reasons for both of these choices.

USENET was a taxonomy, at least in principle, although like any taxonomy of
thought you ran into cases like sci.foo.bar and alt.foo.bar fairly often. A
taxonomy should be read from general to specific.

Email addresses are addresses. The metaphor is a geography, which goes from
the specific to the general.

Then we have URLS, which go from the specific to the general, hit a slash,
reverse direction, and then explode into a bunch of hacked-on features.

~~~
anonymfus
Addresses goes from specific to general mostly in countries influenced by
British empire. Because international standard require to put city and country
at the end, many countries have addresses with mixed order: street, home
number, apartment number, city, country.

~~~
jfb
There are many, many, many people in the world at valid addresses never
touched by the British Empire. China, Japan, Indonesia, Brazil, &c.

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polymathist
Interesting. Now I wonder why Java decided to go the other way with a reversed
domain name for packages. E.g., com.company-name.package-name

~~~
syncsynchalt
In the initial implementation package names were literally mapped to a path
with the equivalent of subst(".", "/").

So in that sense the java package names are based on the hierarchy of a
filesystem.

~~~
greenyoda
Also, the method name goes to the _right_ of the class name, so the only
reasonable way to have a hierarchical name that reads in a single direction is
to put the most general qualifier on the left and the most specific on the
right:

com.mydomain.mypackage.MyClass.staticMethod()

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zokier
So did URL get designed backwards then? Should we have cerf@example.com
instead of example.com/~cerf?

id=5236146?item@news.ycombinator.com maybe?

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penguat
So, is the obvious response to find a way to change our URL paths to
subdomains?

e.g. 5236146.item.news.ycombinator.com ?

Sounds interesting but not productive, to me.

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mleach
Java Developers staring at com.domain.specific namespaces are somewhat
preconditioned to examining this discrepancy.

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charlieok
When domain names were first used, there was no such thing as a URL. The end.

------
wilfra
"This was basically maintained in one giant text file managed by one
organisation."

Actually it was managed by one guy! <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Postel>

~~~
dman
Thanks for linking this - Jon has an incredible legacy.

