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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

TLDs were originally going to communicate something to the user, they never actually did.

Now they represent... how many wasted keystrokes per day? If Berners-Lee agonizes over the second slash after http, then ".com" has to be one of the biggest failures of usability in history.

TLDs were designed by folks who guessed most of the internet would be used for governments and non-profits, and commerce would be this token side niche. Now that nearly everything's .com (or under a quirky country domain to sidestep the whole system), it's lost any significance.

We should scrap it as soon as possible.

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People that don't understand the DNS hierarchy (and history) are doomed to call things failures that were not, and doomed to find new ways to break DNS in the future.

I don't remember the bit in 882 where they said "typing characters that will be rendered vestigial in a few decades is a victory for usability," nor would it be true if they did.

I'm not saying we should return to hosts files, but that doesn't mean we can never do better.

And replace it with what? If everyone has to fight over a global namespace we just wind up with a different sort of problem.

I think the point of the comment you're replying to is that everyone is fighting over a global namespace now, but one that unnecessarily appends ".com" to everything in it.

That interpretation might be overly colored by my personal view of things.

However much I might be inclined to agree that we have a global namespace now, I can't agree that ".com" is 'one of the biggest usability failures in history'. The point has been made before, but seeing "facebook.com" immediately signifies a website to people, using fewer characters than "find us on the web at facebook" ever really could. I found it very interesting to see mainland chinese advertisements with web addresses - for example, renren.com might appear in an ad as "人人网". The two 人 would be written in pinyin as "ren", and directly represent the name of the site; the 网 is pronounced "wang" and means net (here, the internet), but actually represents the unpronounceable suffix ".com". Thus I argue that ".com" is not even a clear loss in usability; it's providing context that people want.

a) That was indeed my point,

b) I was gilding the lily a bit, that's fair,

c) I remain skeptical the benefits exceed the costs, (given the viability of sites that don't end in ".com", and the fact no one's raising "lack of context" as a counterpoint to expansion of TLDs), but you make a provocative point. I could see it as an open question.

AOL Keywords ;)

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