Re: ICANN opens up Pandora's Box of new TLDs

["Matthew Petach" <mpetach () netflight com>]

On 30 Jun 2008 14:47:23 -0000, John Levine <johnl () iecc com> wrote:
> In article <63ac96a50806300036u5c1a9bbdq4efb8e4879650434 () mail gmail com> you write:
>  >Terribly stupid question, but one aproppos to this thread.
>  >
>  >If my company pays for and registers a new TLD, let's
>  >call it "smtp" for grins, and I create an A record for "smtp."
>  >in my top level zone file, how will users outside my company
>  >resolve and reach that address?
>
> In the usual way.  Try typing this into your browser's address bar:
>
>   http://museum/

That was amusing.  Firefox very handily took me to a search
results page listing results for the word "museum", none of
which was the actual page in question.

In order to reach that page, in Firefox 1.5.0.12, I had to actually
enter "http://museum./ and add the trailing dot to force the
browser to *not* treat it as a stub token.

IE was a little more normal, and simply returned a 'host unknown"
error.  Annoyingly enough, however, IE returned the "host unknown"
for *both* "http://museum/"; and "http://museum./"; so it failed to follow
proper resolution practice and ignored the trailing dot.

Thanks for all the pointers!  I guess I won't be suggesting the
use of such TLDs as gmail and ymail as a way to shorten up
email addresses for people, given the inconsistent behaviour
of client resolvers.  ^_^;

>  R's,
> John

Thanks!

Matt