Comments on: Apple, Google and Microsoft still don’t understand new TLDs

By: Tin

Tin — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 04:36:56 +0000

This problem is one of 2 reasons why I refuse to use Chrome. Sure it might be faster at rendering, but that’s somewhat negated by the time it takes me to retype the address with “http://” on front if it decides it’s not real.

Clue for browser developers – If the text looks like “nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn” it’s an IP address. If it looks like “xxxxx.yyyyy” then it MIGHT be a DNS hostname and should be resolved before trying a search.

By: Tobias Sattler

Tobias Sattler — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 16:02:17 +0000

Well, I think so too. Still, I hope they will at least look through the changes I made. I was also thinking about parsing the IANA registry contacts to send the technical contacts an email with a diff file of their TLD and a short explanation what to do, but I canceled it. It would have been a pain to keep track of the changes.

By: Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:59:56 +0000

Wow. Good work.

I think the PSL requires “official” emails because it doesn’t just list the fact that the TLD exists, but also the levels at which domains are registerable (eg, co.uk) . They would need official confirmation from the registry in order to provide authoritative information.

By: Tobias Sattler

Tobias Sattler — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 14:53:23 +0000

I think the problem is the Public Suffix List, because browsers like Chrome and Safari only have a combined navigation and search bar. Therefore they need a hint if it is a domain name or a search string. So I checked the Public Suffix List and saw that there were missing .cw and also many second level domain names. I created a diff file for them. Today I got respone: “Thank you for your patch! This is a long list for changes, we’ll need a little bit of time to go through all of them and apply those applicable. I’ll keep you posted.”. Let’s see what’s going to happen. I hope they are not going to reject it because of: “Please note that all emails must come from an address in your registry’s official domain, otherwise they will be rejected.”

By: Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:52:29 +0000

Reminiscent of the millennium bug problem, innit.

By: Nigel Roberts

Nigel Roberts — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:29:27 +0000

.GG and .JE still occasionally see these sorts of problems even though we started resolving in the root in 1996.

It’s caused by incompetent coders. Instead of prejudging and hardcoding what a valid TLD MIGHT be, how about checking to see if the DNS resolves instead.

If later generations of mechanical engineers didn’t take on board what previous generations learned the hard way, buildings and bridges would keep falling down.

So why can’t software engineers do the same?

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:16:33 +0000

I think the article just needs to be updated to refer to http://www.una.cw rather than una.cw.

By: Kal

Kal — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 23:04:03 +0000

una.cw is mis-configured. The apex A record points to its DNS server instead of the web forwarding service that http://www.una.cw points to. IE and chrome work with http://www.una.cw.

By: Kevin Murphy

Kevin Murphy — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:50:14 +0000

I didn’t mention Firefox because Firefox doesn’t have any problems. I could do a paragraph listing all the software that isn’t affected by the problem but it would be a bloody big paragraph.

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 16:38:42 +0000

Strangely, any mention of Firefox (since when is IE more popular than FF?) is missing in the article, as well as the info that PSL is run by Mozilla.

Biased, eh?