[LINK] Why www.etc?

[Tom Worthington]

At 07:48 PM 4/12/2007, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>... I'm sure that someone will have an answer out in Link land, but given
>the origins of the internet, and the www space, why is it that we have
>backwards web addresses? ...

Postal mail addresses in North America and Western Europe are written 
in a similar way to domain names, with the country last 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_(geography)>. So it would seem 
natural to ARPAnet's designers to write e-mail addresses this way, 
although this does not appear to be explicitly stated in the early 
standards, such as RFC-822 " STANDARD FOR THE FORMAT OF ARPA INTERNET 
TEXT MESSAGES" <http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc822.html>.

The opposite scheme is used for postal addresses in countries of the 
former USSR 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailing_address_format_by_country#Russia.2C_Belarus>. 
Given that the US Defence Department was sponsoring the development 
of ARPAnet, and this was during the cold war, any scientist who 
proposed adopting a Russian addressing scheme might be under suspicion.  ;-)



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                      http://www.tomw.net.au/
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, ANU