Thus spake "Dean Anderson" <dean@xxxxxxx> > These are not proposals to put URI method functionality into domain names, > but to qualify general business types, such as telephone companies, and > mobile phone companies. This is no different from using .museum for > museums and .aero to represent aerospace companies. .aero was a waste of time, as the number of "aerospace" companies is so small that most users won't even realize it's a valid TLD. Ditto for "telephone" and "mobile" company TLDs. These are all far too specialized for the cost of their introduction and use to be outweighed by any benefits to the community as a whole. Now, a single gTLD which would contain SLDs for particular industries might be a worthwhile plan, but adding tens of thousands of gTLDs, one for each industry niche, is plainly not scalable. > So what is the _technical_ problem with having .tel and .mobi TLDs? More importantly, in light of the human problems with that scheme in general, what is the technical benefit of having them? It won't reduce the overcrowding in .com and .net, which IMHO is the only valid reason for adding new gTLDs. Either foo://tel.verizon.com or foo://www.verizon.com/tel is far more expressive semantically than foo://www.verizon.tel. The proposal _loses_ information expressed in the hierarchy: how is a user to know foo.tel, foo.net, and foo.org are all the same company, and foo.com, foo.mobi and foo.aero are a second company with no relation to the first? > A technical problem, for example, would be similar to the problem with > edu.com, which if you recall, was created back in about 1994 or so. > ... > I see no such problems with creating .tel and .mobi TLDs. Of course there is; you risk collisions like tel.com, mobi.com, com.tel, mobi.tel, tel.mobi, etc. With a small, fixed number of TLDs the problem is manageable because most operators will naturally avoid registering such SLDs; each new TLD makes this increasingly more difficult. > It is not the case that URI methods can't share names with TLDs. It would > be fine to have a URI method of, say museum: if you could attach some > sensible meaning to such a method. True, there's no technical conflict, but one must consider the consequences in light of the humans using them. Imagine a world with a "www" or "com" method, or a "http" TLD -- user error would increase exponentially. Users cannot be expected to know why com://yahoo.http has no relation to http://yahoo.com, and we should not put them in the position of needing to unless there is no alternative. > I don't think you understand the proposal for the TLDs. .mobi is not for > mobile _clients_. Its for mobile _Companies_ Equally bad, just for different reasons... .tel and .mobi are exceptionally bad in combination since the two would end up with nearly the same contents, given how the markets are so closely related. S Stephen Sprunk "Stupid people surround themselves with smart CCIE #3723 people. Smart people surround themselves with K5SSS smart people who disagree with them." --Aaron Sorkin _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf