The ampersand

I registered the domain for this site before I had written a word on it, and ran straight into something I already knew and had never had to think about: you cannot put an ampersand in a web address.

Hostnames are letters, digits and hyphens. That is the whole alphabet. The & is not merely discouraged, it is reserved — in a URL it is the character that separates one query parameter from the next, so even where it survives it has to be smuggled through as %26. The name is Watch & Brew. The address is watchandbrew.com. There is no version of this where those two are the same string, and the mild irritation of that is what sent me looking at the dial of the watch on my desk.

Because it has the same split. Under the twelve, beneath the Maltese cross, this one is signed Vacheron & Constantin, Genève. Two names and an ampersand, because that is what the firm was: two people, joined by a conjunction. The house stopped putting it on dials at some point after this watch was made. Modern ones just say Vacheron Constantin, and the join has quietly closed up.

So the ampersand is a thing that lives on the object and not in the index. It is on the dial, on the letterhead, in the way you say the name out loud — and it falls off the moment the name has to be filed, catalogued, typed into a database, or resolved by a nameserver. Watch dealers write “Vacheron Constantin”. I write watchandbrew.com. Both of us keep the ampersand for the part a person actually looks at.

Which is, more or less, the argument for keeping a site like this at all. The grid and the marketplace listing want the filed version: brand, reference, year, condition, price. This is the other one.