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Or, even better, for major metropolitan areas like SF, LA, NYC, CHI etc the name central city can be used instead of state.

Michael Dillon wrote:

This would seem to indicate that geographical domains are a bad idea and that domain names should be based on some characteristic that is less likely to change over time.

The geographical position (modulo state/metro area) of an organization or an individual _is_ the most stable characteristic, on average. Moving long-distance is hard and few people or companies do that more than two times in their life. What i was talking about is that using state names does not provide sufficient granularity. It makes sense to use "locales" instead of historical administrative domains. I.e. a person living in Kansas City will likely to think of it as of a single city, not something between Missouri and Kansas. And, anyway, the goal is to make hierarchy deeper, without making it hard to use. <city>.<state>.us is too long to type. <state>.us is not enough; so here goes my proposal of "extended states". --vadim