On Thu 18 Mar, 1999, Alex French alex@medianet.ie 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.

If we look at the RFC that covers the specification of URLs - RFC 1738 - and looking at the section that applies to http (3.3):

http://<host>:<port>/<path>?<searchpart>

where <host> and <port> are as described in Section 3.1. If :<port>

[and 3.1 says]

host The fully qualified domain name of a network host, or its IP address as a set of four decimal digit groups separated by ".". Fully qualified domain names take the form as described in Section 3.5 of RFC 1034 [13] and Section 2.1 of RFC 1123 [5]: a sequence of domain labels separated by ".", each domain label starting and ending with an alphanumerical character and possibly also containing "-" characters. The rightmost domain label will never start with a digit, though, which syntactically distinguishes all domain names from the IP addresses.

(That sort of 'feature' can allow you through proxy net-nanny filters, too, quite often)

James.