Re:.confusion: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs
by jcl on Friday June 27, 2008 @09:57AM
(#229739)
There is some benefit to having non-arbitrary strings for URLs.
For one thing, if you see the text "interslice.com" on a business card or in an advertisement, you have some reassurance that it is a website. If you just have the text "interslice", the reader needs additional prompting to know it is a website.
Likewise, if you see someone's e-mail address listed as "[email protected]", you can tell just by looking at it that there's probably something wrong with it -- maybe you can even diagnose and fix the problem yourself. But you can't do this for arbitrary strings, which carry no such redundancy.
For one thing, if you see the text "interslice.com" on a business card or in an advertisement, you have some reassurance that it is a website. If you just have the text "interslice", the reader needs additional prompting to know it is a website.
Likewise, if you see someone's e-mail address listed as "[email protected]", you can tell just by looking at it that there's probably something wrong with it -- maybe you can even diagnose and fix the problem yourself. But you can't do this for arbitrary strings, which carry no such redundancy.