104.26.9.209 is a bunch of 8 bit numbers. Lemmy.world is a bunch of translation from ascii to numbers to something meaningful. It directly understand 01101000000110100000100111010001 as on off electrical signals.

[–] dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de 2 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

And your point is? Yes, everything on a PC is a list of numbers. That alone doesn't make an IP address (four 8-bit numbers / one 32-bit number) inherently more meaningful than the ASCII representation of a domain name (eleven 8-bit numbers in the case of "lemmy.world"). The mapping between a letter and its ASCII code is literally one of the most basic things a computer does.

The advantage comes from IP addresses having a fixed length, from IPv4 addresses being relatively short overall (IPv6 is 16 bytes which is about the same as many domains) and from prefixes being used for routing so you don't need a directory of every single IP address at every router (roughly analogous to country and area codes in phone numbers). None of that is relevant for understanding DNS and none of it means that computers don't "understand" text.

Edit to fully illustrate my point: IP addresses could just as well be strings like "de/hetzner/falkenstein12/rack42/server23". That would work. It would take up a lot of memory and be much slower than what we have but it would absolutely be possible to build a version of the internet that uses that instead of opaque numbers. And it would still need DNS on top because nobody wants to remember (or even know) where a website's server is physically located.