9 ms·

> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large

> If I start a new taco truck company and put "burrito.services" or "burrito.catering" or "burrito.ai" in a huge font on the side of the trucks, a fairly large number of people aren't going to immediately recognize that as a web site address. Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it.

fireattack 5y ago
Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.catering/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...
walrus01 5y ago
Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.
- surround 5y ago
  > As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous). https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/
  - walrus01 5y ago
    That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.
  - rightbyte 5y ago
    For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.
defaultname 5y ago
A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.
- fatnoah 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.
moehm 5y ago
Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.
  - moehm 5y ago
    This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www". On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says: "BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..." but then if i see the same sign "WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."
      - deepstack 5y ago
        yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.
        stephenhuey 5y ago
        Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.
scythe 5y ago
I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs. Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.
- nine_k 5y ago
  I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.
- riffic 5y ago
  > There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. too late.
CivBase 5y ago
> Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it. Go with "https://www.burrito.services/ https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.

fireattack 5y ago

Interestingly burrito.catering used to be a thing it looks: https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.catering/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180804010349/http://burrito.ca...

walrus01 5y ago

Certainly, though the trend for printing vehicles, business cards, letterheads, outdoor advertising signs and such seems to be to omit the "http(s)://" or "www"... Since in real world use almost nobody is actually typing the http:// http:// into the browser anymore, as might have been necessary when we were running Netscape Navigator in 1999.

surround 5y ago
> As early as 1996 browsers were already inserting the http:// http:// and www. for users automatically (rendering any advertisement which still contains them truly ridiculous). https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-history-of-the-url/
- walrus01 5y ago
  That, and in a typical virtualhost based http/https setup now, it's standard DNS configuration to point the A record for the 'root' of the domain (domainname.com) to the same IP address as the www.domainname.com DNS record.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  For some reason I typed "www" for an emberessly long time.

defaultname 5y ago

A pretty good percentage of people are just going to remember it as burrito.com. Alternate TLDs are fine for clickable media, but fall apart in print form.

fatnoah 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is why (in the US at least) we end up with online gambling sites located at .com addresses with "free" counterparts at .net addresses. You can advertise the free .net sites because they're not gambling with money, but people typing the addresses in simply go to the .com versions.
- defaultname 5y ago
  Fascinating! I'd never noticed this before. Normal television is dominated by those free-to-play gambling sites, and as you mentioned overwhelmingly they seem to use .net. I always wondered how they made money.

moehm 5y ago

Or "www", as in "www.burrito.catering".

hunter2_ 5y ago
That actually strikes me as anachronistic, because it became popular to drop "www" (not only in print media, but also in the canonical FQDN) well before these sort of TLDs became available.
- moehm 5y ago
  This is correct, though I still believe most people understand the meaning that it's a website if I prepend the "www". On the other hand, I guess most people probably aren't typing the url out anyway but googling it instead.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    Also correct, though using my example and weird new TLDs, let's say in a theoretical example I see a bus stop outdoor advertising board on the street that says: "BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think, "uhhh, is that a website? Well, I recognize .consulting as a TLD. I guess it must be. But that's weird..." but then if i see the same sign "WWW.BURRITO.CONSULTING" I'm going to think: "Well that's definitely somebody's website, but what a weird and anachronistic way of printing it, and why is it using one of those new long generic TLDs anyways..."
    - deepstack 5y ago
      yeah it is a techy thing. Most people who are not techy use "WWW", we just got to go with this. Edit your web server config to handle that.
      - stephenhuey 5y ago
        Exactly. There is plenty of discussion to be found online in techie circles, but in short, if you’re going to use a naked domain to host your website, at least redirect www to it.

scythe 5y ago

I think that's a good thing. There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. A few will pop up that appeal to lots of users, say .taco, and the .com monoculture can be split into a manageable number of TLDs. Humanity is great at this stuff. Natural language is enervated with side channels everywhere. At some point, people may converge on "what a TLD looks like" and new TLDs will often have an ineffable TLD-ness about them.

nine_k 5y ago
I think the reverse is going to happen. In the search for short, expressive names more TLDs are going to proliferate, so eventually many common words will become TLDs. It will be hard to know what is a TLD, except for a few old, well-known ones, like .com, .org, .net, etc.
riffic 5y ago
> There should not be an unmitigated explosion of TLDs. too late.

CivBase 5y ago

> Well, unless you put "http(s)://" in front of it. Go with "https://www.burrito.services/ https://www.burrito.services/" and make it blue and underlined, just to be safe. I'm kind of kidding, but I also kind of suspect the blue font and underline would probably be more immediately recognizable for many people than the HTTPS protocol prefix.