Skip to main content

Why not discard top level domains (TLD)?

Domain structure
During the past few years, I've noticed an increase in the use of customized and abstract top level domain (TLD) names, such as bit.ly, bu.mp, babyli.st, etc. Even Microsoft recently registered bi.ng, and .42 has also been created. (UPDATE: Thanks to commenter tjogin for pointing out that they in fact are all country TLDs. .ly > Libya, .st->São Tomé and Príncipe, etc.)
Until recently, I believed that top level domains were few, and that each served its purpose (.com for commercial use, .edu for education, .gov for the US government, etc). The increase in usage of non-.com TLDs made me think that they are not a limitation, but that we can change them almost freely, presumed we have the knowledge to do it (Please, correct me if I am wrong and forgive my ignorance).
Isn't it possible to make TLDs optional (or hidden)?
Then typing just the readable part of the domain - second level domain - (e.g. google instead of google.com) could send you to the the appropriate address.
The address bar in Firefox will actually redirect you to google.com if you type just google, however what I am proposing is to actually get rid of the TLD for some websites.
Some websites should keep their TLDs. For example I find it favorable that educational domains end with .edu, but I certainly see no use for a personal website to end with .com or any other TLD.
Can TLDs be omitted? Made optional?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Increased Addictiveness of Today's Video Games

This is a guest post by Miles Walker, a freelance writer and blogger who usually  compares car insurance  deals over at CarinsuranceComparison.Org. His most recent review looked at the best  car insurance quotes . Video games have always held some addiction, but now more than ever that addiction is growing. People are spending more time than ever playing the games, and game designers are constantly finding new ways keep it that way. Their efforts have a been a complete success, and some games have true addicts, addicts who play 24 hours a week or more. Visual enhancements Video games have come a long way since a certain duo of Italian plumbers started showing up in people's houses in the late 1980s. By leaps and bounds, video game graphics have become alarmingly sophisticated. Each graphical improvement increased a game's possibilities and added more depth to video games. Designers began thriving on this depth, making games with more achievements, unlocks, levels an

Basic cell counting and segmentation in Matlab

Counting cells manually is a tedious error prone process for humans. Given a large data set of microscopy images this task can be achieved much faster by means of basic computer vision techniques. In this tutorial we will segment cells from an image following a method similar to the one presented by Yongming Chen in 1999. The method uses basic morphological operations  and the watershed algorithm to segment the cells. Nowadays better methods for cell segmentation exist. This method was chosen for its simplicity and ease of implementation. We start with an image of cell-like structures by Anna-Katerina Hadjantonakis and Virginia E Papaioannou . A = imread('cells.jpg'); We convert the image to grayscale: I = rgb2gray(A); To be able to extract the dimmer cells, it is necessary to perform some local contrast adjustments I = adapthisteq(I); Objects on the borders can be caused by noise and other artifacts. We can eliminate objects on the borders

Project planning in a text file

Whenever you work on a project it is important to be able to plan it ahead of time. This holds true for small and big project, from planning a trip to the spa to building a spaceship. The small project plans can be maintained in you thoughts while bigger ones require tools to help you see the big-picture of the project and manage task at a lower level. There are projects which start with a fully prepared plan and projects which pivot overnight, thus invalidating any original plan. For the latter flexibility is very important, and tools like Trello offer a great solution because they can be adjusted to fit your project. However, it may happen sometimes that the project starts adjusting to the tool or that you still want to maintain a bigger picture of the main points of the project. You may also need to produce a rough development schedule to serve as a long term road-map. I have prototyped a tool (and defined a workflow) which allows you to plan such projects. To better understa