Archive for the ‘Advance’ Category

Legitimate domain usage

Saturday, April 26th, 2008

The domain names enjoy a lot of popularity and this exposure has in time led to uses which are outright abusive. The established companies with trademark rights called this cyber squatting and questioned the legality of an approved and allotted domain name. In cyber squatting, a person registers a domain name similar to that of a trademark. The intent is to profit from visitors who browse for that particular, more popular address. Swinging into action and to combat this form of abuse, various laws and policies were enacted.

They drew abusive registrations to be forcibly transferred. However, the law itself was sometimes abused by overzealous companies. They take to reverse domain hijacking, committing a theft of sorts, against domain users who have legitimate grounds to hold their domain names. The legitimate uses also include the use of generic words contained within a trademark. However, this is used in a context within the trademark.

Overuse of domain names

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

The popularity of the World Wide Web led to the site operators frequently demanding for exclusive memorable addresses. They did not pay heed to whether or not they fitted properly within the designed structure. This subsequently led to the over commercialization of the .com domain and soon even non commercial sites began to obtain domains in that particular gTLD. The ripple went on to include sites of all sorts now wanting second-level domain registrations, even if they were parts of a larger entity. The sub domain designed somehow was not enough for them. For example lmnphones.com seemed less, in a way, to lmn.phones.com! It is common to sight a website at ”http://www.lmn.org” often advertised without the http://. In most cases, the site can also be reached by simply entering lmn.org into the browser. This is also seen with a .com, where the website can sometimes be reached by entering lmn! Of course this also depends on the browser version and setting of the configuration settings. These factors mostly vary.

Uses and abuses of domain names

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

The attractiveness of the domain name usage, especially to marketers, resulted in deviation from the manner in which they were initially intended to be used. They were actually created for the technical audience for which they were originally intended. In time, the domain names began being used in a way that deviated from their very design. They were originally planned to follow a structural hierarchy in which the TLD indicated or represented the type of organization. These were categorized as commercial or governmental or others.

The addresses would be brought down to third, fourth or further levels. This was intentionally done to express complex structures. In this way, the company branches and departments and even subsidiaries of a parent organization flaunted sub domain web addresses. The host names were actually designed to correspond with actual physical machines on the network. This communication was generally with one name per machine only.

Top-level domains

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

The extensive use of the internet has led to a variety of dos and donts coming into the picture over a period of time. The exclusive use of the online space desired has led to a number of tools being maintained in place for better and more effective control. One such tool is the TLD or top level domain name after every regular id. The TLD is always either one of a small list of generic names with distinct three or more characters or a two-character territory code. The latter is based on the ISO 3166, with a few exceptions.

The new codes are integrated case by case, gradually. Top-level domain names are also sometimes referred to as first level domain names. The top level domain names make the ids easily recognizable and enhance end user applications. The gradual integration of the codes and the ISO 3166 regulations are all kept in place for the user to benefit from the application.

Hostname restrictions

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

There are certain host name restrictions now levied on users to prevent further confusion. The recent restrictions include hostnames being contained to the ASCII letters – case sensitive ‘a’ to ‘z’. There are confines to the use of the digits 0 through 9 and the hyphen too. Registrars now also restrict the domains to valid and recognizable host names. They are otherwise considered useless. The IDN or the Internationalized Domain Name is a system that has been developed to bypass the restrictions, especially those on character allowances in hostnames. This makes it easier for non-English alphabet users to explore and use the Internet.

Now, the underscore (_) character is used very frequently to ensure that a domain name is not mixed up with a hostname. This kind of confusion has taken place with the use of SRV records. Due to confusion, the domain names with underscores in them are now regularly preferred where host names are required.

Domain name rules

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

There is a general rule that applies to domain names. The IP address and the server names are designed to be functional even when interchanged. In the case of most Internet services, the server basically has no way to know whether the IP address was used to connect or the server name. The extensive use of the internet and the increasing interest in the web indicates that there are many more dedicated web sites than there are servers!

In order to accommodate this boom in web usage, the hypertext transfer protocol or the HTTP as it is commonly known specifies that the client is liable to disclose to the server the name being logged in or used. In this way, one server with one IP address can actually provide different sites for different domain names! This advanced and controlled feature is better known as virtual hosting by the internet users and is a feature regularly used by web hosts.