It turns out to be a complete pain for working out scope in Web crawlers because you need to separate the domain from the path part and deal with them separately. If it was in the opposite order it would be much simpler to process.
The Heritrix crawler (primarily worked on by the Internet Archive) introduces a "surt" form which is basically the domain in the same order as the path so that Reading from left to right it goes from least specific to most specific.
Crawling is an inconvenience, sure it is problematic, but phishing is much more problematic. You can train a machine to parse that thing right-to-left no problem, to tell users to start middle-to-left and then middle-to-right is too much of a burden.
That you've been 'able to deal with it' is simply because that's what you are used to, but that does not mean that that is better or worse, simply a way of life.
Anyway, anything I search for with 'order' and 'domainname' wants to sell me domains, so no citations, but the basic complaint was that it breaks the sequence of a url, where the 'highest' entity should be on the left, and the smallest entity on the right.
So, iirc, the optimimum would have been something like:
http/com/ibm/www/80/somepath/somefile
That wasn't it exactly, but it gives the general idea.
The DNS was long established by the time URLS rolled around so I doubt anything could have been done about it anyway.
If the phishing troubles resulting from the DNS order would have been foreseen I'm pretty sure that they would have picked the 'other' way.
edit:
found something about all this after some digging:
Since the DNS is a hierarchical system, the 'root' of the hierarchy should have been at the beginning, just like in unix you don't start with the name of the file but with the 'root'.
Anyway, the quote I'm looking for is by none other than Tim Berners-Lee, I think it may have been in his book though, not online.
Someone above posted the interview with Tim Berners-Lee, I take it that's citation enough ?
The relevant quote:
"Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance?
I would have skipped on the double slash - there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order - in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:/uk.org.bcs/members. The last two terms of this example could both be servers if necessary."
He didn't invent domain names. He invented the web. So, no, it's not citation enough.
Also, given that domain names were already in the current order, if he'd put it in reverse order for the web, it'd be far worse than what we have now, which at least is consistent across different types of services.
EDIT: I guess you could argue it's citation enough if we assume, based on his examples, that the original question refers only to web usage.
I figured Tim Berners-Lee is in an excellent position to criticize not only his own work, but also the more general case of the domain name system.
Obviously if he had done it the other way around in URLs then that would have been a fairly strong point of critique against the DNS, the fact that he would have in retrospect been better of to choose the alternative in spite of creating two different systems makes that critique even stronger.
Not that it matters, but quoting one person about what they would have done doesn't count as "widely considered". I don't believe any large proportion of people consider it at all, let alone in a consistent direction.
As phishing becomes more and more of a problem this is getting wider 'play', people that are security conscious have commented on this for years, and the hierarchical break between domain names and paths always was an eyesore.
I've seen this crop up in many places, I was looking for Tim Berners-Lee statement if I could find it because I figure he's the authority in the field.
Citations, please? I've been able to deal with it over the years.