Top-level domain/Talk

I've removed the country codes from this page because I didn't see any reason to have them repeated in a second place, especially with the countries not linked. If they should be on this page instead, perhaps we should simply cut and paste the other page's info from the "edit text" box into this one. :-) --Koyaanis Qatsi

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Someone wrote that the TLD is the name after the last dot. That is not true. If you write out the domain name in full, there is no name after the last dot. In full, 'www.wikipedia.com' is really 'www.wikipedia.com.' However, in almost all circumstances you can omit the final dot, so people normally do. (However, IIRC, if you were on host 'don.black.com.', and there existed a host 'www.wikipedia.com.black.com.', then 'www.wikipedia.com' would resolve to that host, not 'www.wikipedia.com.') -- SJK

Could you explain what you mean here? The grammar in RFC 952 does not allow a final dot on the end of a hostname. In what cases are you saying that the dot is allowed? --Zundark, 2001 Nov 10

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Well, to be honest I've never actually read the RFC. Since the root domain is '.', I just presumed that to be fully qualified the domain would need to mention the root domain as well. Otherwise how do you distinguish between the two examples I gave? (I know that using only part of the domain to reach hosts whose domain you are in works in at least some cases: I used to do it frequently...) And nslookup has no problem accepting domains with a '.' on the end... Nor does Netscape... -- SJK

It makes sense that there should be a final dot, but it's clearly not allowed in all circumstances. On a different subject: does anyone have any information about the NATO TLD? It ought to be mentioned in the "Historical TLDs" section, but I'm having trouble finding reliable information about it. It seems to have been set up in 1990 and removed in 1996 (long after it had been replaced in practice by NATO.INT). However, I'm not entirely sure about either of these dates. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 10

Some searching on the Web makes it clear that the NATO TLD was deleted in July 1996. However, I'm not at all sure when it was first established (looks like it could be 1988 or earlier), so I've avoided saying anything about the creation date in the article. --Zundark, 2001 Nov 11