Re: [tld-acceptance] List of all top level domains

[Thomas Roessler <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2004-12-14 13:54:03 +0200, Tina Dam wrote:

> To assist further in making the acceptance of all top level
> domains universal, IANA has developed and published a table
> containing all currently available top level domains. The list
> will be updated as necessary when new TLDs become available.

$ wget -qO - ftp://ftp.internic.net/domain/root.zone.gz | gunzip | \
  awk '($2 == "NS") { print $1 }' | tr -d . | sort -u > hosts.txt^W^H^H

;-)

While it's certainly nice to have that kind of list even more
readily available, I wonder if it really solves any problems with
acceptance of new TLDs -- or if it actually contributes to the
acceptance problems we have been seeing.

In reality, this list will -- if at all! -- be used to seed
hard-coded lists of TLDs in some applications.  These applications
will be fine until the next time the set of TLDs changes. They will
then generate the very problems the list is supposed to solve.

IANA should try to drive home with application developers the point
that the *only* reliable way to verify whether or not a domain name
exists is to query the DNS -- not some list downloaded from a web
site.

Regards,
-- 
Thomas Roessler                       <roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>