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Comment by Taywee | Hacker News Reader

mysite.localhost works fine for very simple development, but can easily fall down with containers, VMs, or multi-machine development. Technically, you can point it to a non-loopback IP, but I wouldn't do that. .localdomain is used some places as well, but I don't know how reliable it is.

.test is a bit more flexible, and what I use now. I'd prefer if .dev was reserved as well, but that ship has sailed.

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It sure can because browsers resolve .localhost https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-west-let-localho...

Indeed the ship has sailed and you can use anything now. I'm in favor of .test becoming a gTLD so you might want to get off that.

.test will not become a gTLD. See RFC 2606.

As gTLDs increase in popularity they could amend that RFC.

Also it's not particularly clear and unchanging already. "TLDs for Testing, & Documentation Examples" includes .localhost. However, .localhost can be used for more than just testing and documentation. It's treated as a secure context in browsers and subdomains have different storage areas on browsers. (Shockingly, localhost:8000 and localhost:8080 aren't kept separate by browsers)

Those 4 reserved labels in that RFC are not going to be released, period.

I wasn't talking about the other ones, just .test.

Maybe as a Blockchain tld :) then it isn't DNS.

Currently new gTLD applications are paused and it's hard to remember how hot it was back when they were open or see how hot it's going to be when they're reopened.

Unless and until they are.

Don't underestimate the greed of the people making these decisions.

I work in this industry and know the people making these decisions and I'm not aware of anyone in favor of releasing the RFC 2606 reservations.

Would be done by someone asking for forgiveness instead of permission. :)

That's not remotely how ICANN works though. Everything always takes many years and has a million different discussions, processes, veto points, etc.

It would start off outside of ICANN, like Unstoppable Domains.

Edit: wow, ENS has .test domains: https://docs.ens.domains/contract-api-reference/testregistra...

Those are fake domain names. They don't resolve in the root DNS nameservers. This is one of the many reasons that "alternate roots" are terrible and will never be widely adopted.

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