A post over on BexHuff got me thinking about syntax. The gist of the post was that DNS is backwards. As they wrote;
http://specific.general.very-general/very-specific/very-very-specific
Putting directions in that order makes about as much sense as these directions: turn left at reception, go to this company, go to France, then make a right.
Which I guess is true – but then I thought; does anyone really look at URL’s anymore? Isn’t 90% of browsing done via Google? As I commented to BexHuff;
Why have all that bizarre http, www, and slash this and slash that stuff – it’s all counter to user-centricity
So what about it, in this approaching era of semantic web presence, is it time to find a new naming system – or even to go beyond systems and work purely on tags?
This is a required evil, there isn’t any way more logical. URL’s are basically
{type of request/syntax(also determines port)} ~ {hostname – directs some nice text like “diversity” to a server on the network “210.48.100.35” by checking NDS} ~ {file directories}
That’s an oversimplification and you can read more somewhere like here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme#Generic_syntax – but tags etc are something for browsers to use to better search a database like Google or your bookmarks, whereas “syntax” in this instance is the base underlying technology.
There are 5 layers to tcp/ip that constitute the “how”, let’s not try and re-invent that…
You’ll also find that almost every anti-phishing/net privacy/net safety measure involves in some fundamental way the DNS system.
This is because (a) DNS is itself (reasonably) secure and relatively hard to spoof (b) Registration/Ownership of a domain is often aligned quite strongly with various real world identities/gaurantees that we are familiar with – for example, we know that anything happening on a name that ends in yahoo.com is something that, ultimately Yahoo! Inc will be responsible for.
Have you ever tried to re-organise DNS at a large organisation. Fortnately I haven’t but have heard many times that it quickly becomes a massive political bunfight. Thats a pain, but it also indicates that DNS is connected to politics in a way that can be useful.
If it ever gets to the point that we don’t use actual DNS names to navigate to and/or access content then we will be opening ourselves up for a huge phising/scamming/spamming problem.
I realise that DNS is not impossible to fake out or scam but in fact its really the bedrock on which a huge amount of anti-spam/anti-scam measures rely. I think we need it.