Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

I want URLs that handle spaces. Like I could enter www.coca cola.com. [and not www.coca-cola.com. nor www.cocacola.com.) and it would work. "Simple space". Even the Latin/Roman alpha had space(s).

View on HN

The Romans wrotewithoutspaces as in "continuous script" [1], however they·did·use·the·interpunct for delineation on inscriptions. In order to have spaces in domain names we would need to use another sign, such as • [2], to separate words and avoid ambiguity.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua

[2] The bullet • (U+2022) alt code is 7, or Opt + 8 on Mac. The interpunct · (U+00B7) alt code is 250, or Shift + Opt + 9 on Mac. Rather inconvenient for the regular user.

Is that ever ambiguous in Latin, or is there enough variation in declensions and conjugations (and enough of them) that the word endings are always clear?

Quote from Wikipedia: 'For example, a phrase written in scriptio continua as collectamexiliopubem may be interpreted as collectam ex Ilio pubem, meaning "a people gathered from Troy", or collectam exilio pubem, "a people gathered for exile". Thus, readers had to be much more cognisant of the context to which the text referred.' As in everything, context rules over content.

www.google.com [a ton of spaces that HN won’t let me type] jknotgoogle.com

I just want a single contiguous space character so I don't have to suppress the space or substitute with an alternate character --also URL boxes can make it conspicuously obvious for better UI. And while they're at it, allow & (ampersand).

Maybe the location bar should accept the space but strip it? That would work for input if not reading the URL. Maybe only allowing single consecutive spaces to avoid the address spoofing example. I could go for that.

I would love & natively though. For my wedding (bride&groom.com for example) I looked into faking it with punycode but nothing was close enough, and anything other than an ampersand would have been too hard to input.

good think hyperlinks are typically underlined so there will be a large training line at the end

Unless someone turns off the underlining with a stylesheet.

Google search urls are typically long enough that they are shortened by ... At least on mobile

Domain registration already has a lot of rules around length, what characters can be where in the domain name (ex. no hyphens as the very first/last characters), ... I'm sure it'd be trivial to have a "no-repeating-spaces" rule or similar.

google.com [spaces] pwned.evilcorp.com it is

You can have spaces in URLs: https://matthewminer.name/spaced%20name

You just can't have them in domain names.

Sure, I meant the whole URL, including the domain portion as in my example.

Space is perfectly legal in URLs, but not in a domain name so your example won’t work for that reason.

> Like I could enter www.coca cola.com. [and not www.coca-cola.com

Aside from all the comments about what's wrong with this on a technical level, this is a poor example since the product name is actually "Coca-Cola" and not "Coca Cola".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com