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Comment by andrewheins | Hacker News Reader

Is there a default domain for these tlds? Let's take .home for example. How will this work when typing it into a browser?

If you have my.home, it makes sense. If you type www.home, it really looks ugly, but I guess it works, and we've spent the past few years moving away from including "www" as a whole.

Typing "com" into my url bar doesn't get me anywhere, so I'm assuming typing "home" won't either. If I bought "apple", is there going to be a conventional or canonical "default"? home.apple?

I really find this confusing.

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Is there a default domain for these tlds? Let's take .home for example. How will this work when typing it into a browser?

I believe it's possible to set things up so that "home" or "co.uk" on their own will work. As below, my memory is hazy, and I have no idea how many RFCs this behaviour might violate, but I certainly remember us doing so.

My background: many, many years ago, I used to work for a minor country-code tld, and we set up fun email addresses such as: a@cctld or t@cctld (for Tom ;-)). My memory is hazy, but I think this violates some RFC somewhere. Mail still got delivered, though.

This would be tricky for LANs. I'm not sure too many corporate network admins would be happy with the amount of work they'd have to do to change up all the DNS entries when "test" no longer routes to "test.company.com" while you're on the company.com domain. You'd have a riot when the development staff has to take a couple weeks to change over all their pathnames.

I'm of the opinion that RFCs don't matter if they're not being enforced. What matters is the implementation that exists in the real world. It doesn't matter what the ITU says 4G is supposed to be when 4G already implemented as something completely different. What would make sense is www.home routing to the default .home domain.

It wouldn't be quite such a big problem, since well-behaved clients should attempt to use 'home.company.com' before the root 'home'. Regardless of what is possible or allowed by RFCs, that behaviour should discourage TLD holders from trying to use a naked 'home', since a lot of users wouldn't be able to access it.

See, that's really interesting. I wonder if that's been patched since then.

It just seems weird to have a tld absent a host.

I should have applied for .localhost.

A TLD can have an A record. For example, http://ac/ leads to a webpage.

Also, RFC 5321 explicitly mentions the possibility of email addresses where the domain consists of just a TLD: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.5

http://ac/ didn't work for me.

nslookup

Non-authoritative answer: Name: ac Address: 193.223.78.210

then again my upstream provider defaults to opendns.com so http://ac in the browser does not work.

It doesn't work for me either, but http://ac./ does.

Just guessing: Maybe the .apple won't be used for the root apple site, but could be useful for microsites like ipad.apple or icloud.apple? Or, heck, they could have just applied lest some cybersquatter gets hold of that TLD.

Try entering "ac" or "ac." in your browser. It's a TLD with an A record, so it should just work.

If you have a host on your domain also named that, well, things might get interesting depending on how your resolvers work (domains, search order, dotting, whatever). Plus, if you're in a corporate environment or something else with a proxy, add all of those demons, too.

Buckle up.

(Random trivia: I checked all 676 two-letter possibilities, and these are the ones which should work: AC AI CM DK GG IO JE KH PN SH TK TM TO UZ VI WS)

Browsers assume you want to search for 'ac', you need to put http://ac explicitly. I wonder if they'll change that behavior now.

That ("fixup") and the other leak-to-Google stuff ("keywords") are probably the first two things I turn off when I start using a browser. I had too many mispastes turn into potential data leaks before figuring that out.

You mean is there a default host for these domains? I doubt it, that's not how domains work. These will be alongside .com .org .gov etc. It's a domain name, not a host name. Expecting to get somewhere when you type ".com" or ".home" into your address bar is like typing "192.168" and expecting to get a "default host" for your local network.

And thus my question about a conventional default. It just seems to me that buying the gTLD will leave users fairly confused.

If you want to access Apple (generically), users will still go to apple.com because even if they know that there's a .apple domain, what's the root host?

My best guess is a conventional default emerges shortly.

Well it's up to whoever runs the root DNS for the domain I guess. But I've never heard of a domain with a default. edit: oh never mind i'm being thick :)

And this isn't necessarily about people wanting to find apple's main website. Apple would have control over all subdomains and hosts in the namespace. They could give a subdomain to every app in the app store. So if you want the Pandora app, you don't navigate to Pandora.com were you might see ads for other mobile devices. https://www.pandora.com/everywhere/mobile You would go to Pandora.apple and only see the iOS mobile app.

> But I've never heard of a domain with a default.

www is the default, he's not talking about software.

There would be no default, just like there is no default for .com, .net or .org.

These are top level domain namespaces. So in the case of .home. The registrar for that domain can sell my.home, your.home, newyork.home, etc. The equivalent for the .com domain would be my.com, your.com, newyork.com, etc. Make sense?

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