Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

> It's impossible to make an addressing scheme that's both memorizable, and abundant

Not really. In fact, pretty much anything would have been easier to memorize than this colon-separated nonsense, which makes URL parsing more difficult, and which is so stupidly complex that it has a special syntax to ignore repeating zeros.



An IP address is fundamentally a 32-bit or 128-bit binary number, and hexadecimal is the most human-friendly base to represent those. Decimal gets pretty hairy once you introduce CIDR prefixes that aren't 8-bit aligned.

The [IPv6]:port syntax is unfortunate, but I'm not sure what they'd have done instead. Dotted hexadecimal would be ambiguous, because "1.2.3.4.5.6.beef.de" looks like a DNS hostname.

Zero compression exists because it's more convenient than writing all those zeroes, especially with CIDR prefixes like "2000::/3".


I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port. Note that they can even distinguish octal and decimal IPs, for example this is working in Chrome, Firefox and the Windows ping utility:

http://0100.0351.0251.0152/

As well as decimal:

http://1089055082/

Both lead to google.com


> I think browser are advanced enough to parse [IPv6]:port.

Except for recent versions of Firefox Mobile: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/4343


you're free to use the entire 128 bit number, or the older dotted decimal notation.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: