OSNews

Using short URIs / URLs (cf. RFC) is definitely interesting for contexts where you can't click on hyperlinks directly. Written material and even verbally communicated links ("Go visit ...") are such cases. But why does the punctuation appear in such an ungood place? In the past, most URI were formed <topic/organisation/thing>.{org|com|net|<national_suffix>} . Because .ws exists, osnews.com -> osne.ws, but that split the part "news" in "osnews". Woudln't it be better to split it as os.news? I know that's not possible because .news doesn't exist (at least not at the moment, I think). While it's easier to understand and to communicate "oh es news dot com" (as well as "oh es dot news" would be) in a spoken statement (than "oh es nee dot doubleyou es" or even "osnee dit doubleyou es"), it's handy in the case that you need to enter it via keyboard, and it's still readable (allthough "news" is now "ne.ws" which has potential to interrupt the reading flow, but I know that this doesn't matter).

An interesting task would be to write a program that, given a dictionary of the english language, determines all possible combinations of "word" -> "wo.rd" where "wo" is the first part of the given word, and "rd" is a valid suffix. :-)