Ask HN: Have you ever visited example.com? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have you ever visited example.com?

10 pointsglaberficken9 comments

Sorry if this seems a bit pointless, but for the first time just now I visited https://example.com/

Expected to find the typical "spammy" parked domain page, but instead learned this: http://www.iana.org/domains/reserved

Had no clue about reserved domain names before today! You?

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Also note that example.com has no MX records [1]:

    When an address such as username@example.com is used to demonstrate
    the sign-up process on a website, it directs the user to enter an
    actual email address at which they receive mail. Example.com is used
    in a generic and vendor-neutral manner.

The list of reserved TLDs is quite short actually [2] but thanks to this page I understood that ".dev" is a bad TLD that people enjoy(ed?) using for their test/local websites [3]. I have been using ".test" for all my offline projects for a couple of years now, and ".local" was specifically very helpful when I had to build a fake DNS server for a DNS manager that I was maintaining.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Example.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level_domain#Reserved_doma...

[3] https://iyware.com/dont-use-dev-for-development/

I always use the example.net/example.com domains for my documentation. It drives me crazy when I see a tutorial using something they just made up like "myfakewebsite.com". Almost always, these lead to an actually registered domain like what OP was expecting to encounter.

I use it as a non-HTTPS site that I can use to log in to Starbucks Wifi.

I use warriorforum.com for that

Some domains are not to be sold, to avoid domain squatting and the kind of spammy websites you were expecting.

Yes, I use it as an example URL for tutorials or for testing out any HTTP-request-making code.

Sure. Example.com is an Internet standard. See http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt

Yes, it is used a fair amount by web developers. Often I notice more junior developers making up their own things, but that leads to situations where your debug/private messages can be sent to a real person. I'll see things like null@null.com or something@nothing.com, which is bad.

I believe the owner of null.com gets tons of emails from buggy OnStar notices to mom+pop websites.

Special Use for now, but this could change at the whim of standards bodies, and could become an ordinary domain. It certainly would be interesting to own such a domain and see what kind of emails you'd be getting.

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