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Simon Willison’s Weblog

TBL on TLDs

Tim Berners Lee (how many TLA celebrities is that now?): New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. Read the whole thing—Tim blows the .xxx and .mobi proposals out of the water and takes a neat swipe at for-profit registrars in the process. Reading this, the main thing that struck me is how incredibly forward thinking TBL really is. People complain about the long duration of W3C processes and the futuristic nature of the semantic web but the W3C are trying to build technologies that will still be relevant ten or twenty years from now. When you consider the longevity of TCP/IP, this is a really smart strategy. It’s a shame so many people involved with the web have trouble thinking past the next few months.

Posted 22nd May 2004 at 6:23 am

This is TBL on TLDs by Simon Willison, posted on 22nd May 2004.

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5 comments

  1. Indeed, TBL's thoughts are usually really deep. Check out the origional proposal for the WWW, and it compare with the W3C's current work with RDF published 15 years later. Errie.

    Jimmy Cerra - 22nd May 2004 07:20 - #

  2. Thanks for the pointer Simon. After reading through the article, I got the impression that TBL doesn't have a problem with the .xxx (presumably for pr0n sites) TLD. His main issue is that the .mobi domain is intended for _mobile users only_ which breaks his concept of how the www should work.

    I supect he'd disagree (quite rightly IMHO) with a .microsoft, .linux or .stonetablets TLD. A TLD shouldnt limit its access to a particular device/platform: that isn't its job. Everyone should be able to get to the information regardless of their browsing platform.

    It's quite humourous to think that the .mobi sites probable method of identifying platforms (checking the HTTP_USER_AGENT header) would be so easily spoofable as to make the whole cocept a joke anyway.

    What? You wont let me view your site as I'm using Mozilla on my bedroom PC and I'm not on a mobile phone? Hold on two seconds while I spoof my headers... ;-)

    Richard@Home - 22nd May 2004 07:39 - #

  3. I agree .mobi is a ludicrous idea and have stated so in the past let alone the inaccessibility aspect the could be caused by such a suggestion.

    Robert Wellock - 24th May 2004 13:13 - #

  4. Greed is the only reason why people become flyby inventors/innovators. Commom sense still prevails and hopefully will when i'm old and fragile

    jboy - 26th May 2004 04:18 - #

  5. I agree that the idea of many of these top level domains are a money making thing. Remember the degree that the .tv domain was going to be huge, almost every company related to TV would flock to using it. Now many years later, there may be just one major entertainment company using it.

    Gary Miller - 27th May 2004 12:49 - #

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