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).
Your example of tiny.small.big.bigger is the wrong way to look at it. Instead, look at it as 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".
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.
Because of this inherent hierarchical inconsistency in standard URI formats, my projects sometimes internally use a reordered variant of the URI we call 'SURT form'. For example:
The parentheses and commas make it absolutely clear that you're dealing with a reordered URI-authority-component.
Even the trailing comma and off-paren are significant in our most common use-case: determining whether a URI falls within a certain hierarchical collection-scope by making a simple prefix-comparison. Compare the prefixes:
The first would also accept < http://(com,googlepages, > URIs, while the second would accept all subdomains of < com,google, >, and the third accepts only URIs strictly on < com,google, > but not its subdomains.
Because no one really cares, it really doesn't matter, and it won't get changed anyway (too many things depend on it). There are so many problems in the world that can be addressed and are worth addressing... this is not one of them.
This is a solved problem... We tried this with AOL keywords, and registrars hijacking DNS for search and both of those turned out to be a bad idea. Browsers these days will bring you to the .com domain by default anyway when you have a search provider selected. PS. Anyone else notice the Snake game on the site?
