[LINK] Why www.etc?

[Glen Turner]

On Tue, 2007-12-04 at 19:48 +1100, 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?
> 
> Surely sites should be in the following order (example follows):
> http://au.net.abc/rn/scienceshow/default.htm

The DNS was designed prior to the web.
Filesystems were designed prior to the web.

The major network application when DNS was designed was e-mail. The
e-mail format
  gdt at its.adelaide.edu.au
was adopted -- most specific to least specific. This allowed e-mail
addresses like
  gdt  -- if the sender was in IT Services at the University of Adelaide
or
  gdt at its  -- if the sender was in the University of Adelaide
and this was seen as an advantage in an age where e-mail addresses were
typed.

Filesystem names in UNIX run from least specific to most specific.
This isn't the only possibility -- filesystem names on VMS and MVS
run in the opposite direction. (Having used both operating systems I
can say that the UNIX method works much better.)

Web URLs, stripped down to basics, are
  method://server/filename
There are strong engineering advantages to handing the unmodified
server name to DNS and the unmodified filename to the web server.
One of the under-appreciated aspect of the WWW is its no-nonsense
approach to design -- simple, but enough to do the job. The low
number of restrictions of the format of filename allowed it to
be implemented by a huge range of operating systems (usually
converting "/" into the operating system's directory separator
was the major munge the WWW server had to do).

Sure a most seemingly consistent scheme could have been developed.
But this would have complicated the engineering. And I'll note that
the competing hypertext systems of the era all had more complex
engineering than WWW. But no one knows about them anymore: they
were just too hard to be simply installed and configured by hundreds,
then thousands of sites.