Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When one of my colleagues in China resigned, he sent his personal mail id to keep in touch. It read something like this: xxx@163.com (I felt it was a bit weird that a site had only numbers on it but I didn’t give it any further thought). When I Google’d a bit though, I was surprised to find that it is, in fact, very common for Chinese sites to have only numbers! Christopher Beam gives many such examples : “For example, the massive online retailer Jingdong Mall is at jd.com or, if that takes too long to type, 3.cn. Check out 4399.com to see one of China’s first and largest online gaming websites. Buy and sell used cars at 92.com. Want to purchase train tickets? It’s as easy as 12306.cn.” This seems insane. Wouldn’t it be much harder, if not impossible, to remember so many numbers, I wondered? Why would anyone choose numbers instead of letters for their website? Beam found the answer, and it makes perfect sense once you hear it: “To a native English-speaker, remembering ...

In a recent blog , I had written about the pain of URL’s as the way to surf the Web. Turns out the URL may be a necessary evil after all! Allen Pike explains why : “I realize that URLs are ugly to look at, hard to remember, and a nightmare for security. Still, they are the entire point of the web.” Why? Let John Gruber explain : “The web has always been a nebulous concept, but at its center is the idea that everything can be linked.” And so, Pike reminds us: “The term “web” is no accident – it refers to this (linking) explicitly.” Given that definition of the Web, imagine how you would link to an article without a URL: would a Google search always get you to the exact same article? And as long as the answer to the above question is No, as Pike says: “Unlike other modern technologies that have hidden as much complexity as possible, web browsers have continued to put this technical artifact top center, dots, slashes and all. The noble URL caused a revolution in shar...

On the Net, links have been the way to reference for a long time. Nicholson Baker added a YouTube URL in his (physical) book but then wondered whether the link mechanism could be improved : “Well, I really want people to listen to Stephen Fearing…And of course the worst possible way to tell them to go, I guess, is to give them a dead YouTube link, because they’re going to make a typo…So I kind of blew it.” Alan Jacobs took that point and narrated a brief history of the URL . Explaining that a URL is a proxy to the IP address of the site, he said: “For human beings, the former is easier to remember than the latter.” But then as websites exploded, Jacobs points out that the URL’s got too long to remember. Jacobs agrees that this may not be an issue because: “And anyway, within the last decade more and more people have been giving up on even a basic understanding of URLs, trusting Google results instead. Google’s highlighted blue links — in your own language! — offer a layer...