

Are TLD's Necessary? - Rusky

Seeing things like http://to/ and Tim Berners-Lee apologizing for the slashes makes me wonder about top-level domains. Would it be feasible for urls to look like http:google rather than http://google.com, or are TLD's necessary for nameserver load balancing or something?
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thwarted
I'm not sure what TLDs have to do with slashes or vise versa.

<http://to/> is using _only_ a TLD, it's not that it doesn't have a TLD.

Many of the URL components are optional and if not specified designate
relative URLs to be filled in with parts from the base URL. For example, if
all your internal URLs in a document are //domain/whatever, that is they don't
specify a protocol, then the page is completely viewable on both HTTP and
HTTPS protocols without having the browser indicate mixed security contexts.
Without the double leading slashes indicating the hostname, you'd be unable to
recognize that a URL is relative to the protocol vs relative to the dirname of
the current document. In the same way, http:/file fills in the hostname from
the current base URL.

TLDs don't really mean much technically, they were created for human
consumption. There may be load balancing issues that are made easier because
of TLDs, but it's not technically a requirement. On your own name server, you
can create a zone that ends with anything (try it).

There have been recurring attempts/suggestions to get rid of TLDs, somewhat as
a response to the needlessly ever-expanding TLD list, and somewhat as a
response to break up the monopoly that exists in determining them ("If only
more people could make their own TLDs, the world would be a better place, woes
is us!"). More TLDs mean more costly trademark enforcement and continual
attempts to corral different kinds of services/websites into predictable
naming schemes (.xxx, .sex, .travel, .biz, and the super-stupid .tel, .name,
and .mobile) -- people have specifically been against .xxx or .sex TLDs with
the argument that it would be easier to convince law/policy makers to _force_
people to use them for adult sites and thus limit free speech, for one
example.

I don't really mind TLDs, I'm not convinced that lack of TLDs would be any
kind of significant win. In the same vein, I don't like San Francisco's
apparently random street numbering scheme and fake grid system (random streets
that run for a block start at 0, no matter what the surrounding addresses are,
or a single block is bounded by different address ranges (check out the block
that Sanchez Elementary School is on
[http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=San+Franci...](http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=San+Francisco,+California&ll=37.763442,-122.429543&spn=0.003728,0.005944&t=h&z=18)
this block is bounded by the 300 and 400 on the west and east, and 3400 and
3700 on the north and south), which disturbs this boy's sensibilities being a
nerd who grew up in Chicago, which is on a strict grid system), but I'm not
going to suggest that it change either.

~~~
Rusky
I realize <http://to/> is a TLD and slashes don't really have much to do with
TLDs; they just got me thinking about URLs in general. Relative URLs with the
protocol specified is something that hadn't occurred to me before. Thanks!

One question- I'm not too sure how a DNS lookup works from start to finish,
but creating your own arbitrary zones wouldn't work for most people, would it?

~~~
thwarted
Well, you'd do that for internal purposes. Anyone could set one up, so in that
sense it would "work" for most people, but it wouldn't resolve for people who
don't use the name server that the zone is setup on. I can see a use for it,
but I think it's easier, conceptually, to create a private subdomain within an
already established and registered publicly accessible domain and limit its
access with views (a capability/feature of ISC bind (and perhaps others) where
different zones are made available based on the source address of the DNS
query).

The .local TLD, which is where zeroconf/rendezvous hosts end up is a
standardized example of that. It is resolved not via regular name servers, but
rather a network-segment limited distributed broadcast (an
oversimplification), however.

