Ask HN: Why do so many German websites have dashes in the URL?

1. Germany doesn't have TLDs like ".edu", and it became a de-facto standard to construct higher education domains by abbreviation of type of school and location: www.[uni|fh|...]-[location].de

2. Dashes in a URL emulate spaces, and in German, without spaces a phrase is often ambiguous. Example: "Gehweg" = sidewalk, "Geh weg" = get lost! Even in English, I often think a domain name would be easier to parse with dashes, e.g. "calstatela.edu" vs "cal-state-la.edu".

3. There's a strong compulsion ingrained in almost every German to be orthographically correct, and delimiting words correctly is a big part of that.

T-Online is actually named T-Online as a corporate entity, so the domain isn't odd or anything.