4 ms·
They occupy such different parts of my conceptual headspace that it never occurred to me that filename extensions could be confused with TLDs, or vice-versa. B
by avalys 3y ago
They occupy such different parts of my conceptual headspace that it never occurred to me that filename extensions could be confused with TLDs, or vice-versa.
But clearly, this is a problem!
Why is Google actually doing this? Presumably they have some motivation other than making a small profit on registration fees. What’s their angle here?
- _0nvm 3y agoI once heard a story about a client who thought HTML was short for "hotmail".
- bombcar 3y agoThey were almost right, the original HoTMaiL was stylized like that because the word was picked as having "mail" and "HTML" in it.
- mywittyname 3y agoThat's actually really clever.
- bombcar 3y agoSamba was named the same way: >The name "Samba" was derived by running the Unix command grep through the system dictionary looking for words that contained the letters S, M, and B, in that order (i.e. grep -i '^s.*m.*b' /usr/share/dict/words).
- eric_the_read 3y agoJust imagine if they had gone with "sombrero", how much more fun networking would be. Or smörgåsbord!
- nerdponx 3y agoWhy S M and B?
- meindnoch 3y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block
- takeda 3y agoI think they were also one of the first web based e-mails. This was when majority people used email clients.
- _0nvm 3y agoI would argue the majority of email users back in the 90's were actually using Unix clients like Pine. Some of the first major users of email in those times were college students, all universities setup email accounts for each student, hundreds of thousands of daily email users, which could be checked at dedicated terminals in libraries, etc. Those were usually Pine. Just think of those many thousands of users all knowing the Pine keyboard shortcuts to send an email -- I think I can still remember them, actually. There was no mouse.
- _0nvm 3y agoThis client was I think a novice web designer and assumed all web files were "hotmail files" as a result of this misunderstanding.
- Xerox9213 3y ago[dead]
- tomjakubowski 3y agoPleasant memory here of being a naive kid and trying to register a domain by creating a file with extension COM.
- happytoexplain 3y agoI don't have a strong opinion on whether this TLD is a bad idea, but I just wanted to point out: Conflating TLDs and file extensions isn't even in the same universe of the most "obvious" mistakes many computer users can make. You might as well be surprised that a random person off the street might not know the difference between Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin.