On 03/18/99 01:34:50 you wrote:

Here's one for the obscurities wishlist: our NetCaches don't recognise integer representations of IPs. Instead of interpreting 3263497985 as 194.133.7.1, for example, they look for www.3263497985.com.

Although nobody in their right mind would want to do this, people do use it when they want to obscure the tru source of a URL (yes, mainly in dodgy newsgroups, I know).

Argh!!!

I would just like to say I think this is really, really dumb. I've seen more and more people using this "trick" in the past 2 years and it's just annoying as hell. It's just a side-effect of a particular lookup routine! If you check the specs for just about anything (especially URLs) you will see this is *not* guaranteed behavior.

If people want and expect this, put it in the standard. Until then, if you find out people have trouble getting the that URL, then that's what you get for using it!

The problem is enough lookup routines handle it anyway that the ones that don't look like they are the "non-standard" ones, so now they are forced to adopt this inane behavior.

Bruce