Ask HN: Why not top-down URLs (com.Y Combinator.news/item?id=123)

1 points by TheSpiciestDev 5 years ago | 3 comments

Why can't URLs start from the top domains and dig deeper into other subdomains and then finally resources? Today we start from lower subdomains and make our way up to top level domains, all to then go further back down into directories and items. Could something be made to experiment this without refactoring infrastructure?

liamwestray 5 years ago |

Because Tim Bernese-Lee did it this way and stated he wished he had done it the other way. It was somewhat arbitrary then, and makes less sense now than before.

i0nutzb 5 years ago |

What do you think the benefits would be?

mikece 5 years ago | |

It might be more culturally sensitive. Americans identify each other by first name then surname whereas this isn’t the case in large parts of the world (especially East Asia). The internet being invented in the United States carried this cultural bias into the operation of TLD, domain, subdomain order.

Which isn’t to say it’s wrong... it’s just the way it is.