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Comment by sidpatil | Hacker News Reader

> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address.

Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

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A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.

I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.

Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.

Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.

> As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous).

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/

That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.

For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.

> Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

Go with "https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.

Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".

That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.

This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www".

On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.

Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says:

"BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..."

but then if i see the same sign

"WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING"

I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."

yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.

Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.

Yes, 'www.burrito.consulting' looks akward, but most people born after 1960 will recognize it as the URL for a web site.

People outside tech generally don't realise that domain.tld and www.domain.tld are two separate hostnames, and adding www. makes it much more recognizable to the general public.

On sites for government we always have lot of confusing emails if we don't also make the www in front of subdomains work:

So for subdomain.burrito.com, we redirect the wwww.subdomain.burrito.com

People are just so used to it.

No that was just idiots being fucking lazy

Lazy? Running without www can actually be a decent amount of work:

1. Avoiding the relatively common pairing of {a host whose IP address changes without warning so you need to CNAME it; a DNS provider that doesn't offer CNAME flattening a.k.a. ALIAS a.k.a. ANAME}.

2. Scoping session cookies so user agents don't also send them to your subdomains.

And maybe even more stuff I'm forgetting.

I think none of http, www or .com actually work anymore for all audiencies. What I see more often is stuff like "<instagram logo> @burrito_catering" or "<facebook logo> burrito_catering".

It is interesting to see the same signs and logos on non-north american businesses where much the same approach has been adopted for GFW-compliant things within China, where a retail store might have some nice glossy logos for alipay, wechat pay, weibo and qq

Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...

I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs.

Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.

I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.

> There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs.

too late.

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