On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 23:15, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
In fact, it would look pretty weird to most people if we started writing 951-21-42-33 (or I bet they wouldn't expect that was a zip code in any case). Similarly, if we start placing the separators in arbitrary places in phone numbers, people get confused.
The complete uniformity of telephone numbers seems to be a North American phenomena, but as a German who is used to wildly different phone numbers, I would still prefer a common scheme for all of them, yes.
I still disagree. While I noted the one pathology with the current system, that same pathology is present with floating colons and there are others which I also pointed out (difficulty in reproducing the "correct" placement of the floating colons in automated output, for example.
Even worse, allowing floating colons will mean different groups will adapt different defaults. Not a desirable goal.
The syntax for handling this was already present in IPv4 and is easily adapted to the problem in IPv6. Simply wrap the IPv6 address in square brackets (e.g. [2001:db8:feed::cafe]:80 is the ipv6 address 2001:db8:feed::cafe on port 80).
Which is admittedly ugly, but I can't think of anything better, either.
We did forego ::192.168.1.1. However, we still have ::ffff:192.168.1.1 and for good reason. This is a useful construct for allowing humans to see in log files that an IPv6-aware application on a dual-stack machine accepted an IPv4 connection on an IPv6 socket.
Agreed. Ugly, but useful & needed. Richard