Ask HN: Why do so many German websites have dashes in the URL? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do so many German websites have dashes in the URL?

4 pointsdavehcker5 comments

I notice that a lot of German domain names have dashes in the URL (something that I've been trained to not love at first sight (pun intended)).

A quick lookup gave me these:

Berlin School of Economics and Law [https://www.hwr-berlin.de/en/] Hamburg University [https://www.uni-hamburg.de/en.html] University of Heidelberg [https://www.uni-heidelberg.de/en] Some Startup List [https://startup-map.berlin/home]

And even some of the top Alexa websites:

https://www.t-online.de/ https://www.wer-weiss-was.de/

Based on my basic knowledge of the German language, there is no such unusual usage of dashes in the language itself, but there are far too many URLs that use dashes. Any reason/ thoughts?

Multiple reasons come to mind.

1. Germany doesn't have TLDs like ".edu", and it became a de-facto standard to construct higher education domains by abbreviation of type of school and location: www.[uni|fh|...]-[location].de

2. Dashes in a URL emulate spaces, and in German, without spaces a phrase is often ambiguous. Example: "Gehweg" = sidewalk, "Geh weg" = get lost! Even in English, I often think a domain name would be easier to parse with dashes, e.g. "calstatela.edu" vs "cal-state-la.edu".

3. There's a strong compulsion ingrained in almost every German to be orthographically correct, and delimiting words correctly is a big part of that.

Probably related to German language structure / separation of 'megawords' would be my guess.

T-Online is actually named T-Online as a corporate entity, so the domain isn't odd or anything.

Would be curious to know how many English (USA, UK, Australia, South Africa, etc...) websites use dashes? Did you find any data on that?

Here's Alexa top 50 for Germany

https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/DE

Actually something I'm planning to do once I get some time. Can't find any sources to get enough websites say, ~500+

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