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

["Tina Dam" <dam@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Thomas,
Thank you for your note. The list was requested from several parties in the
community and is a first step in a longer process. The suggestion you make
below is similar to what was mentioned to ICANN and IANA staff during the
Cape Town meeting. It makes sense to me as well to facilitate and drive this
kind of information - potentially by making a few code lines available for
those who are not familiar with making such query.

I have added this to the list of things that we have been asked to do to
solve the current problem.

Thank you again for your input. 

Tina Dam
Chief gTLD Registry Liaison
ICANN

-----Original Message-----
From: Thomas Roessler [mailto:roessler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Thomas Roessler
Sent: Wednesday, December 15, 2004 11:40 AM
To: Tina Dam
Cc: tld-acceptance@xxxxxxxxx; 'Doug Barton'
Subject: Re: [tld-acceptance] List of all top level domains

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>