OK, I see that.
But (and maybe I'm just too cynical) the huge benefit for W3W is that it's much harder to reverse engineer the identifier-assignment code. So only W3W can generate valid identifiers.
Re:Why Bother with What Three Words?
by CJefferson on Thursday March 28, 2019 @06:16PM
(#19517175)
The data files you need to store are fairly small. The bigger problem is people who have done their own imple tstion got threatening legal letters.
Re:Why Bother with What Three Words?
by tsimionescu on Friday March 29, 2019 @04:16AM
(#19519955)
Minor nitpick: URLs do tend to be used with the larger scope first (i.e. /resource/child/subchild). Domain names are the odd exception.
Re:Why Bother with What Three Words?
by thaumasiotes on Friday March 29, 2019 @07:37AM
(#19520713)
HTTP paths are not conceptually hierarchical at all; they're opaque strings.
People set them up that way in practice because they prefer thinking that way. Or, I guess, because they want to sort their URLs meaningfully. Does that happen?
That's a fair point. But the fact is that people do tend to set them up as hierarchies.
But maybe you're right that most people don't understand that, given how adversaries exploit stuff like "games.apple.com.foobar.hosting.tw". You wouldn't fall for that if you understood the system.
The system pretty explicitly considers all squares equal, without a hierarchy such as you envision. There are no identifiers for larger agglomerations of individual squares.
(And more specifically, where identifiers are hierarchical, you generally have the larger scope first, not last. URLs are a bizarre exception.)