[sedatk]

> I really do wish they'd just stuck with dots

Then it would get confused with domain names (e.g. babe.cafe).

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Ah, right, because we threw in hex. That's fair, but then I return to: If we're doing that, we should have changed the port separator.

[kccqzy]

Using hex is probably a mistake. We didn’t use hex for IPv4 and that worked really well.

[nickburns]

If it ain't broke!

[NewJazz]

https://github.com/cloudnative-pg/cloudnative-pg/issues/1071...

https://github.com/Qualys/Qualys-Helm-Charts/issues/4

[yjftsjthsd-h]

I contend that needing [] to disambiguate is absolutely broken.

[wpollock]

I wonder how many readers realized your joke here. For the ones who didn't, the 4-byte "magic number" that identifies Java .class files, in hex, spell "CAFEBABE".

[Doxin]

It's also just sort of generally used as easily spotted value in a hex editor. similar to DEADBEEF, ABADBABE, CAFED00D, and probably a bunch more variations on the concept. CAFEBABE seems especially prolific, getting used for -- among other things -- poison value for memory pools in plan9 and MACH-O universal object files magic number[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexspeak

[userbinator]

Dots and decimal, like 47806.51966.0.0.0.4919.57005.48879

[theamk]

reserve a TLD, like ".v6", and you are done.

URL parsers don't break, the amount of code to change is not that big, and many of the user-space applications can keep working with no changes at all, as long as they use high-level network libraries.

If you really hate this for some reason, use some other characters. How about underscores (_) for example? Those are not valid in DNS, so there is no chance of confusion.

Choosing colon when URLs were already using it is either very stupid or very mean.

[ianburrell]

There is the .arpa domain used for reverse lookups. ipv6.arpa is already used for that. But combining the ipv6-literal from Microsoft, gives ipv6-literal.arpa.