The concept of the domain on today's internet is a bit anachronistic on the internet these days. People just want to get "places" on the internet, not to addresses.
Domains are still the best thing anyone has managed to come up with. We just need better administration of them since ICANN sold out.
they have little to no conception of what a TLD is
actually, most people use an app on their phone for everything and avoid the web browser
I don't say this to insult the average person, this is simply what I see non-engineers do
As Palomides mentioned, most people just search for a website they will go to instead of typing in whatever cute domain you've crafted.
My point being that while it may feel anachronistic in the US these days, think that there are many countries that are not the US :-).
You do realize that domains were invented so people could get to "places" instead of addresses, right?
So pray tell, what would you replace domains with? And what advantage would your schema have over what exists now?
Because, the addresses don't go away. Underneath whatever you come up with, will always be an IP address, and has to be, because you need a way to route packets.
So whatever you want to replace domains with, has o solve the exact same problem: Wrap IP addresses in a nice, human friendly, hierarchically organized schema, that is easy to read, remember and type.
I'm quite content with what we have, however. A "unique string domain" regime has to pick between an anarchic landscape of independent registrars playing whack-a-mole with sniping and squatting, or a single central source of truth, neither of those strikes me as ideal. I don't think routing would actually be an issue though, given the power of today's servers and good algorithms for hashmaps in the many millions of keys.
Technically correct, but in practical use, it is absolutely a requirement. Entities within domains are usually hierarchically organized, this already starts at the top level by having www.domain, mail.domain, dns.domain, file.domain, ...
So if we implemented a scheme without built-in hierarchy, I can 100% guarantee that one of the first things admins will do, is implement their own hierarchy naming conventions on top of it, just to keep things organized. The difference then is, that we won't have one clear way to do that, but hundreds of different ones.
> I don't think routing would actually be an issue though, given the power of today's servers
Anything that relies on "worse solution offset by throwing more compute at it", is an instant "denied" in my book. That's how we ended up with electron apps.
We agree about the utility of heirarchy in domains on a social and administrative level, though.
No I'm really not, I am simply saying that doing something in a way that requires way more compute for the same result, without ANY tangible advantage over the existing system, is a bad solution.
It doesn't matter if its doable.