On 11/21/10 7:54 AM, William Herrin wrote:
We've gone too far down the wrong path to change it now; colons are going to separate every second byte in the v6 address. But from a human factors perspective, floating colons would have been better.
From a computer parser perspective, a character other than a colon would have been better because colons are already claimed for many for other syntax elements that include an IP address, like the address/port separator in a URL.
The benefits of hindsight are myriad... The uri schema is contemporaneous with rfc 1883 as is a lot of formative work in a lot of areas 1992-1994 range. There is a lot of assumption on the part of ipv6 that the use of ipv6 literals in uri's would be a rather infrequent occurrence, given how infrequent it is in ipv4 it would seem to be a reasonable assumption.