Memories of .us
15 days ago
- #Internet History
- #RFC 1480
- #DNS
- Elementary school memories include vinyl tile floors, playgrounds, and a teacher's chess board project.
- The Domain Name System (DNS) was developed to address the cumbersome manual listing of machines in early computer networks.
- DNS was designed as a hierarchy with delegated control, allowing registrants to manage names under their domain.
- Domain names are structured from least to most significant, contrary to some other hierarchical systems.
- Top-level domains (TLDs) like .edu and .com were initially fixed, with second-level domains available for registration.
- The use of third-level names like 'www' became a convention, but deeper hierarchies are less common for human use.
- Country-code TLDs (ccTLDs) and global TLDs (gTLDs) reflect DNS's US origins, with .gov reserved for the US government.
- RFC 1480 proposed a geography-based hierarchy for the .us domain, but it never gained widespread adoption.
- School districts were a notable exception, using formats like [district].k12.[state].us.
- Native Sovereign Nations (NSN) adopted .nsn.us, a late but enduring part of the RFC 1480 scheme.
- Locality-based names fell out of favor due to user-friendliness concerns and the expansion of DNS bureaucracy.
- The federal government's preference for .gov over .us further marginalized RFC 1480's proposed hierarchy.
- Despite their decline, many RFC 1480 names remain in use, particularly in legacy systems and smaller agencies.