Michael Dillon writes:
On Tue, 9 Jun 1998, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
How does providing different top level domains for different categories of organizations "violate the laws of physics", Michael?
It tries to confine objects to a single state whereas physics teaches that the universe cannot be so neatly sliced and diced.
Of course, I could have simply asked the question that needs to be asked, namely: why would anyone want a name to include a category anyway?
Your name, Jay Ashworth, gives no clue as to your education, your training, your profession, your age, your race, your height. Why should an Internet domain name be any different? The DNS needs to be hierarchical so that a query can trace a path from the root of the DNS to find the IP address belonging to a name. But why should the branches in the hierarchy mean anything in particular in any given human language? Some people would like to restrict .com to COMMON usage, .org to ORGASMIC providers and .net to CLEAN content (net is French for clean), but I personally don't give a damn and prefer a more diverse and chaotic system of naming.
Ahh but you're wrong.. Ashworth is his family identifier. It gives him a possible relationship with other "Ashworth"s in existance. Chaotic and diverse naming is fine as long as you have a rather nice way of indexing it all. But.. we don't. (And don't joke about search engines..) FOr example. Wouldn't it make more logical sense if there existed a domain 'movie.com' with which movies were registered under? Saves stuff like http://www.titanic-themovie.com/ or whatever it is since Titanic is taken. And it means that there can be a rather logical choice to start a search of your favourite movie's official web presence. What about looking for a car? GOing online shopping? Finding pr0n? (oh wait, thats one thing search engines are good for..) With the sheer amount of information on the internet today there really needs to be a decent distributed indexing system for all of it. DNS could have been it if it were maintained a little more thoughtfully from the beginning. My 2c.. (I think its 0.7c in the US..) Adrian