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Comment by pervycreeper | Hacker News Reader

Offtopic, but ".website" is pretty much the worst TLD conceivable.

Why so?

If it's used for a website, it's redundant. If not, it's inaccurate.

You can't very well call it redundant when it's not possible to leave it off. There's no reason for a tld today. Every keyword should be a TLD, no reason you shouldn't go to http://microsoft

But given that that's not possible, http://microsoft.website would be better than http://microsoft.com except on historical grounds.

Do you know what "com" stands for? Commercial? Would you believe me if I made a convincing argument that it stands for something else - probably.

I see your point (imagine an alternate future where websites are uncommon, for instance), but I would expect that a very large number of URLs will persist and remain live for quite some time into the future. So that TLD must be viewed in a context where other TLDs

As it stands, TLDs are not used for their intended respective purposes in practice (.com for commercial, country codes, etc), so expecting this situation to suddenly change is unrealistic. I would expect, in fact, that the most successful uses of .website will be by smartasses for IRC, email, etc.

Not sure I can agree -- just as with all TLDs, it serves as a namespace. My.website isn't the same as My.webapp, which is different from My.webshop. I'm not sure any of these really are worse than My.com? In the end, it's just an alias for a numeric identifier.

Yes, they're much worse. TLDs are namespaces, not protocols or application level guides. Imagine: john@something.mywebsite ftp://something.mywebsite and so on. It makes no sense to indicate the desired protocol in the domain name. I know that for many people the 'web' and the 'net' are now synonymous but that's calcification and in the future that may simply not be true. I sincerely hope that the web is not the final word on connectivity.

I'd say if you want to email John that runs the "something" website, john@something.website is a perfectly fine email address... (as is ftp://something.website if you want to access the the something website via ftp....).

If something.website is actually not a website, then things are different. But we live with something.net not being an ISP, and something.com not actually being a commercial entity -- so I can't accept that the new TLDs are that much worse than the old ones? Not to mention the geographical based TLDs... is really "codewith.us" defined by being based in the USA?

Naming things are famously hard, and you can only have one TLD for a single "thing" (Not counting things like att.com for the commercial entity, and att.net for the ISP etc) -- if what you do is run a website (eg: medium, blogger, mypetproject.website) -- I don't see .website as being a particularly bad TLD.

All that said, I do agree with your last two paragraphs.

So it's the same as www in front?

I disagree. "www" (just like ".com") denotes a URL. Something.anything doesn't look like an address unless you put "http://" in front, which is too technical for most people. I think "www" and ".com" are here to stay.

"www" is generally taken to mean (world-wide-)web server (as opposed to ftp, gopher, telnet, smtp, imap or just "mail" server). So you could say needing both "http(s)://" and "www" is redundant.

Similarly, http://ftp.company.com is a bit of a misnomer -- if it was an ftp server, you'd have to use "ftp://" -- but of course a single host might run several different daemons, or a daemon might speak several different protocols.

I can appreciate that for many people "www" and ".com" 'denotes a URL', and also agree that without context, "Something.anything" doesn't really look like an URL. I fail to see how that's a problem within the context of hypertext (where the expected behaviour is clicking a link).

[Ed:spelling]

http://ftp.company.com makes perfect sense. It is the http listing of the files stored on the server, linking to the actual files served using FTP. FTP isn't made for dynamic content and the file list is just that. The main role of the domain is FTP serving, though.

Good example!

I'm sure the billions using the Internet won't be able to answer what "www" and ".com" stand for, but does it matter? I agree about the hyperlinks and some browsers (Safari) don't even show the URL so the domain becomes less and less important today, but on TV, print, and so on, the domain and the URL still matter and people know "www" and ".com" better than "http://", which is not shorter and is pretty cryptic as well.

Yep.

cuz everythang with a TLD is a website! and it's long!

I agree it's a strange TLD. But it's the other way around: A given TLD doesn't necessarily have to point to a web server/website at all - any kind of service could resolve this host name.

Thus the '80s .darkweb, .free, .proxy, .milquetoast .ftp3 and .test, like .ipv6eternal, did not take, as properties for future rentiers. The idea of Conway with variable local neighborhoods died hard about as fast, with a small revival when it could be done on GPU. .cytokine anyone?

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