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Comment by dpedu | Hacker News Reader

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dpedu

Isn't delegating a zone pretty much the same concept in DNS? Or am I missing sarcasm here?

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Sarcasm.

People get confused (particularly in the US) if they are always used to x.y.

I like fully qualifying domain names (like x.y. in your example) and it’s funny how many sites break when you do this

Wait, really? Could you share some examples? Why would they break for a FQDN. Wouldn’t that mean that the root servers aren’t configured correctly for that TLD?

I'm not sure exactly why things break, but as an example: fully-qualifying youtube.com (to youtube.com.) used to break the code that displayed the ads and you could watch ad-free

Yeah was sarcasm as it seems to be a really obvious thing to do.

We do it in the UK with <councilname>.gov.uk

(Not sure if it's actual delegation or just A records though)

We also do it in the US, although I feel like it was more common 20-years ago than it is now. For example, here in North Carolina, local school systems are typically “https://[county name]schools.k12.nc.us”

Yeah, our state did that kind of thing 20 years ago, but people get confused with more than x.y, because nobody ever taught anyone the concept that domains are a hierarchy and that periods have a specific role that’s different to slashes, hyphens, etc. So to 90% of people they couldn’t explain how “order.TacoBell.com” is different than “TacoBell.order.com” and as such wouldn’t ever remember what order “k12” “nc” and “us” might go in.

Indeed, because the hierarchical nature of addressing conventions is a new thing.

Not sure if sarcastic or not. I think most people don’t think of a URL as an address in the way that a building has an address with a strict hierarchy of meaningful parts. I think people think of it more as an atomic long string of characters that the person who made the site labeled it with just by being the first to claim a certain URL.

You still have the "email can't get to Essex or Sussex" problem though.

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