There are two interwoven threads of logic in my post. You've mistaken the second as limited to the first when it is building upon it. To clarify: It /used/ t

There are two interwoven threads of logic in my post. You've mistaken the second as limited to the first when it is building upon it. To clarify: It /used/ to be that .local wasn't mentioned in any standard. Don't do anything like .local (a non TLD and not part of a standard), because there is now a history of standards being created that break existing private deployments, and also because OTHER TLD like things can now be purchased as TLDs. That is why the current best practice is now to have an internal subdomain of a real domain (even if not globally published).