The rules of web addesses

pisstaker — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:06:29 +0000

According to wikipiedia

"Each string of letters, digits and hyphens between the dots is called a label in the parlance of the domain name system (DNS). Valid labels are subject to certain rules, which have relaxed over the course of time. The original rules state that labels must start with a letter, and end with a letter or digit; any intervening characters may be letters, digits, or hyphens. Labels must be between 1 and 63 characters long (inclusive). Letters are ASCII A–Z and a–z; domain names are compared case-insensitively. Later it became permissible for labels to commence with a digit (but not for domain names to be entirely numeric), and for labels to contain internal underscores, but support for such domain names is uneven. These are the rules imposed by the way names are looked up ("resolved") by DNS. Some top level domains (see below) impose more rules, such as a longer minimum length, on some labels. Fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) are sometimes written with a final dot."

So q.com is probably a website from back in the day!

andy206uk — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:37:07 +0000

They either registered it before the restrictions were decided upon (waaaaaaay back in the day) or paid ICANN a hell of a lot of money to get around the restrictions. It would be easier to work it out, but none of the whois searches on the net let you search for 1 letter domains (because they're 'invalid')

teammatt3 — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:38:18 +0000

Quest (q.com) has a single letter .com, how'd they manage that?

andy206uk — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:22:22 +0000

not really... its just one of the rules that are insisted on (even if you could have them they would all be gone already anyway)

pisstaker — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:40:45 +0000

Out of interest, is there a technical reason behind the "2 digit/letter rule" for a domain name? From trying out a few things, you cant have 1.com, but 10.com or a1.com is fine. Just curious.

andy206uk — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:12:38 +0000

I work in support for a domain registration and hosting company and it always irritates me when I ask customers what their domain name is and they tell me it starting with http or www - duh! i know that bit already, just give me the domain already!

My sites are all class-A, but that's because of the hosting config. I could delete the www a record in a snap if I wanted to.

Abhishek Reddy — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:02:58 +0000

Most every site I visit survives just fine without a www.

University sites are really bad when it comes to www and other subdomains. I don't know why. Sometimes I get the feeling the same network tech administers all of their networks, or they were all trained at the same school or something.

www stuck around so long, I think, because it's simply less ugly and more memorable than http://. Take for example addresses shown television advertisements, where a URL can be inconvenient for newbies to learn, whereas an address without a www or http:// won't be recognised. That ought to change in due time.

pisstaker — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:49:40 +0000

I know, typing www. is just so passé! I want to get ahead of the next fad though, and start a movement away from domain names back to pure numbers. If I start it, people can just type "1" in the address bar and they go straight to The Pisstakers. So much easier, I think!

teammatt3 — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 21:44:05 +0000

I've never heard of them before. But on all my new projects I go www-less too. www is so web 1.0 .