Bad analogy:

email:

   georgex@somedomain.sometld

www:

   http://somedomain.sometld/~georgex/

real life:

   George Xandros 
   553 Sunset Blvd
   12322 San Jose
   USA

So, the web is mixed up, and the other two are 'backwards'. None of them get it in the most logical way.

Same with dates:

   2002.10.09

vs

   09.10.2002

or

   10.09.2002

It's all about conventions, what we're used to, so to say 'the same reason' is calling upon a reason that you don't state, when if you thought about it long enough would boil down to 'that's how we've always done it'.

But that doesn't really answer the question.

The most 'logical' order is to put the larger units up front, and smaller ones towards the end.

But since we are where we are that isn't going to change 'for the same reason' (too much investment) that England isn't going to switch to driving on the 'right' side of the road.

Once a convention is established even if there is a marginally better one the cost of switching usually outweighs the advantage of the switch, not to mention a whole bunch of messy stuff during the transition.

Is there a clear benefit to driving on the right hand side of the road, over the left?

On the whole there might be, but I'm not sure of that. In the current situation, yes, because there is a cost associated with having to support two kinds of driving styles.

I have both 'LHD' and 'RHD' cars and find that I can switch at will, but most people are uncomfortable in the 'wrong' kind of car because it messes up your overview when overtaking on 'b' roads (two laners).

If everybody would be driving the same kind of car on the same kind of road then that problem would go away.

In China, addresses do work that way. Word order of addresses is a language-specific rule that varies by language.

Same for Russia. Also, we never use MM/DD/YY.

And what reason is that?

The most local comes first because the rest is optional. Both in real life (“give that to Peter”) and to some degree for computer network addresses.

You can email ‘peter’ which would be on same machine, ‘peter@arts’ which would be on the ‘arts’ machine on your LAN, or ‘peter@BigCo.com’ which would be on the WAN.

The http protocol takes existing domain names and tags on a path. The domain name system was already in place, so if anything had to be reversed, it would need to be the path, but that would be rather problematic.