[Sigia-l] Subdomain usability

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> I think people do this because of the evil stupidity of sites 
> that insist on it. There are, sadly, enough of them around 
> that 404/equivalent out on just the domain name that people 
> are wary. 10 years after AOL and friends brought access to 
> the great unwashed, billions of pages later, and there are 
> still sites that do not work without the 'www.'. I think that 
> if we guillotined a few of the main miscreants publicly, the 
> rest might work it out. Or not.

That's a somewhat inflammatory comment, considering this "evil
stupidity" is in fact simply an attempt to avoid problems that can arise
with wildcard DNS configuration:

http://www.iab.org/documents/docs/2003-09-20-dns-wildcards.html

The IAB do not officially frown upon it, but do say:

"If you want to use wildcards in your zone and understand the risks, go
ahead, but only do so with the informed consent of the entities that are
delegated within your zone."

However, since usability should be free to trace an orbit independent of
technical correctness, I'm with you - burn the b*****ds!

Jonathan


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