It’s time to place the web in safer hands

Re:It’s time to place the web in safer hands by jaylevitt on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @08:19PM (#3454624)

Why, oh why, does everyone assume that a plethora of TLDs implies that all those TLDs must contain a complete copy of .com?

I claim the problem with the first big expansion - .pro, .info, etc - is that it WASN'T wholesale. Yes, if half the Internet thinks that only .com exists, and you add .biz, every corporation has to go register .biz as well.

If you add a thousand real, active, well-used TLDs, they don't, simply because that is no longer how the Internet works. We already see the start of this with ccTLDs; Apple (a pretty aggressive trademark defender) does not own http://www.apple.fm, and nobody expects them to, and nobody is confused that they don't. I'm sure my grandmother sometimes confused Elvis Costello with Elvis Presley, but nobody thought the one was impersonating the other, because people have last names, and that's how it works, and that's normal.

Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

If you change that, you've changed that. Because you changed it. So it's not the same.

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Re:It’s time to place the web in safer hands by Jach on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @08:35PM (#3454669)

I'm in complete agreement except this:

> Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

I would say it's even worse now. Many people's mental model is "I type it into Google and they take me there" or "I share this clickable text around and don't have to type anything".

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Re:It’s time to place the web in safer hands by jaylevitt on Wednesday January 11, 2012 @10:06PM (#3454865)

I think their use case is worse, but their mental model probably includes other TLDs - or at least they've probably GONE to other TLDs. Some (More? many? most?) people just prefer to type URLs into Google for some ungodly reason. I watched a junior web designer do it today, and she certainly knows what URLs are; it's just How You Do That. For you and me, it seems like an extra hop, but for her, the extra hop would be to realize "I already know this URL" and override her muscle memory.

Then again, I set up an alias called "gwssh" that goes to our EC2 gateway machine and then to the target machine, and more than once I've typed "gwssh gate" because I'm too "lazy" to type "ssh gate".

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Re:It’s time to place the web in safer hands by DanBC on Thursday January 12, 2012 @06:43AM (#3455967)

I think it's worse in US; over here (UK) people are more used to .co.uk or .org or whatnot.

People don't really know what an URL is. During ealry days of WWW and broadcasting presenters would read the whole thing; aitch tee tee pee colon forward slash forward slash double you double you double you etc etc. There's still not much awareness of what the bits of an url breakdown to; you still see even the BBC make mistakes about domain names and TLDs.

And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC compliant <>.

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Re:It’s time to place the web in safer hands by lurker17 on Thursday January 12, 2012 @07:20PM (#3458587)

> And I'm always gently disappointed to see URLs delimited by () and not RFC compliant <>.

Choosing a bracket character that resembles a tag, for use in the case when you are definitively trying NOT to create an HTML tag, seems a misguided choice in the RFC.

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