> Using colons for separators when they’re already being used for ports served no purpose but to confuse.
Dots and colons are the only separators I can think of that are available on common keyboards, and don’t look ugly. We can’t re-use dots because then there’d be addresses that are _both_ IPv4 and IPv6. And I’m serious about the ugly part! Try writing an address out using commas or semicolons or asterisks or something, it just looks weird.
> Having more than a single valid form of an address again only serves to confuse.
Yes, as the article demonstrates, it certainly introduces edge cases that aren’t present in IPv4 — but the alternative is having to type out all the zeroes. Would you want to type out ’0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0001’ each time?
> If there’s anything to learn from the UNIX principals it’s there is great power in making things easily manipulated as strings.
I think this is a testament to how wrong that statement is. How many scripts have broken because a file path has a space character in it? How many content injection attacks have there been, caused by code that blindly concatenates strings together? IPv6 addresses are just another example.
It’s a shame, but IPv6 is the best we’re going to get.