cartesian-heights.org

[jack]

How about cartesian-heights.org? It's distinctive, it's a nice name, it looks fairly easy to type.

Are hyphens sane in domain names? I know many sites automatically reject[1] any email address with a "+" in, is a "-" likely to be a problem?

If you saw it, would you remember if it had a hyphen, dot, underscore or nothing between the words? If I said "cartesian heights dot org with a hyphen" would you understand it?

Are you familiar enough with the adjective "cartesian" to be able to remember it if you hadn't heard it before?

[1] See standard "why go to such an effort to make life more difficult for people?" rant

Comments

[d37373.livejournal.com]

I would be a bit surprised if an email filter rejected hyphens. + Is more understandable, in that the stupid way to go is to assume that an email address has the same allowed characters as a URL. Wrong, but an assumption people make. Also, since the hyphen is part of a 'normal' domain name, you might hope that they won't screw it up - even if they would when you used a hyphen before the domain.

Also, the aim is generally to make things more usable, by alerting people when they mistype the address. I haven't seen statistics, but it may be a god trade-off. Not something I would feel happy about, the obsessive that I am.

Not sure if you've seen this, but it's the reason people don't do accurate validation: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

since the hyphen is part of a 'normal' domain name, you might hope that they won't screw it up

Yeah. But it's quite hard to calibrate my stupid-filter very accurately. It never occurred to me people would exclude "+" as a matter of course (which they do), nor that they would exclude "0" (which afaik they don't), and "-" is somewhere in the middle, but all those look sufficiently similar to me, I wouldn't like to guess where relative to "-" the line is drawn :)

the aim is generally to make things more usable, by alerting people when they mistype the address.

That does make sense. I can't believe having a "+" but otherwise being valid is a common typo, but it does make sense to check. I'd much rather they had a "I know what I'm doing" button and let you confirm that you really meant it, rather than just rejecting it[1] but understand why that's fraught.

I mean, apparently " "@foo.com is supposed to be valid, maybe, but I'd understand rejecting it when I've never heard it used, but people actually _do_ use "+".

Then again, they mainly use "+" so they can filter out mail from people they don't want, so maybe companies don't like to allow it?

[1] I imagine sometimes you can fake this if the authentication is just for user-friendlyness and implementation is client-side, and you create a custom POST request, but I can't be bothered to find out :)

Not sure if you've seen this, but it's the reason people don't do accurate validation:

ROFL. Yes, quite. No, I hadn't. Some things are just possible in regex but are definitely not sane :) However, in this case, afaik, all alphanumeric and underscore characters are treated as valid, and almost all others are treated as invalid, and there's a few special cases, so all you'd have to do here is move "+" from one to the other, so neither way is actually more or less work. (OK, you might want to exclude +@foo.com. But then you probably want to exclude _@foo.com, if you're going to be that "helpful" :))