Royalmail.com

[pne]

I went to royalmail.co.uk. It redirected me to royalmail.com.

What's up with that? I would've thought that they'd register a .uk domain! They're a UK company, for goodness' sake, aren't they?

For me, this is on a level with the fact that the US Army public-facing domain is goarmy.com and not army.mil. (Unless I've misunderstood something.)

Treating top-level domains as meaningless is somehow irking for me. (I also find it weird if German companies get a .com domain, especially local/regional ones such as Hamburger Hochbahn AG—though to their credit, they're also hochbahn.de now.)

Comments

[jordik.livejournal.com]

Well, .com is of course (in theory) international: it stands for 'commerce'. The USA country TLD is the seldom-used .us
Any commercial site could be at .com

And of course to most noobs "internet" means WWW-dot whatever dot-COM...

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well, .com is of course (in theory) international

Yes, OK. And I'm fine with that for international companies such as, say, IBM. I'm also fine for having US-only companies use it (for historical reasons). But UK-only or Germany-only companies with a .com domain seem a bit silly to me.

And of course to most noobs "internet" means WWW-dot whatever dot-COM...

I suppose there is that. Oh, and email addresses are, of course, www.username@provider.com.

[nik-w.livejournal.com]

I know quite a few UK companies that use .com instead of .co.uk (or, in some cases, as well as). Like the previous poster suggested, I don't think it's a country-specific TLD these days. It's an internationally-recognised thing (can't think of the exact word I'm looking for... symbol? trade mark?). I think there's a certain amount of prestige attached to it as well - if you only have .co.uk, you are seen as a smaller company than one that has .com, as they are more of an international company. If that irks you, what are your thoughts on .tv domains, being as they're not being used for the people of Tuvalu?

.tv

[pne.livejournal.com]

what are your thoughts on .tv domains, being as they're not being used for the people of Tuvalu?

My main thought is that companies are silly for paying the very high fees that the .tv NIC charges for its domains, and that they're silly for wanting such a domain.

I feel slightly different about .cc .cx .to .nu which have also, in effect, become "generic" domains, but I'd only see them as such for private people or organisations, and would consider them silly for company domains (unless they're present in the corresponding country).

[karen2205]

You also don't want a competitor to buy up the .com name and have people mistake it for you/someone buy it and fill it with totally inappropriate comment. It makes sense to have both the .co.uk and .com names under your control. Hence why http://www.villagefabrics.com points to the same place at http://www.villagefabrics.co.uk

[pne.livejournal.com]

You also don't want a competitor to buy up the .com name and have people mistake it for you/someone buy it and fill it with totally inappropriate comment.

Fair enough. So register the .com equivalent and redirect it to the .co.uk/.de/.fr/whatever -- but not the other way around (IMO). Or provide exactly the same content whichever URL a visitor uses, as Village Fabrics seems to do (though the two sites seem to display slightly differently in terms of text width). But don't redirect the country-specific one to the .com one.

[karen2205]

Hmm - I don't know why they're displaying differently in terms of text width. What has me rather more concerned is that the url http://www.villagefabrics.com doesn't change when you request other pages within the site. This is bad netiquette which I need to fix, but I don't know where to start.

http://villagefabrics.com/

is what I get when view the source of a .com page - which would suggest that the redirect isn't being done sensibly (I'd never write HTML that looks like that) and probably also explains the slight difference in text alignment.

*adds to to do list*

[pne.livejournal.com]

*nods* it would explain the difference -- if the .com site is simply the .co.uk site in a framesite, the available width may be, say, one or two pixels narrower on each margin (to account for invisible frame borders or something), which will affect word breaking.

suggest that the redirect isn't being done sensibly

I presume you used some other company's service to "redirect" the domain; this sort of thing is a fairly frequent method. Sometimes hiding the real URL is a desired effect, so that people going to www.impressivecompanyname.com can't easily see that the contents are being served from, say, www.geocities.com/Lame/Stupid/1235/ or whatever.

The proper way is probably to use DNS to point both domains to the web server, then configure the web server to accept requests for both domains and associate them with the same set of files.

Incidentally, you may be thinking <pre> does something more than it actually does. (In a pinch, you could try <xmp>; however, that tag is deprecated AFAIK and does not "work" [that is, does not "quote" embedded HTML tags] in all browsers, specifically Opera. Better to escape at least opening < as <, even inside <pre>.)

[karen2205]

The proper way is probably to use DNS to point both domains to the web server, then configure the web server to accept requests for both domains and associate them with the same set of files.

Yeah....this is slightly beyond my technical ability right now. I'll have to see if I can find someone to take pity on me and point me in the direction of instructions I might understand. Maybe at the weekend.

I thought <pre> ignored all formatting - it's not a tag I've looked into much, because I don't generally want preformatted text to appear in my HTML.

pre

[pne.livejournal.com]

Briefly, pre applies to how white space and line-wrapping are treated (so you can insert multiple consecutive spaces or line breaks with just spaces and new lines, and you don't get word wrap). It doesn't affect HTML tags, so you can still have, say, bold or italics inside a block of preformatted text.

(pre bits are also usually rendered in a monospace font.)

[karen2205]

OK, <pre> doesn't do what I thought it would.
This is the HTML in question.

<HTML><HEAD>
<META NAME="description" content="">
<META NAME="keywords" content="">
<TITLE></TITLE>

</HEAD>
<FRAMESET ROWS="100%,*" BORDER="0" FRAMEBORDER="0">
<FRAME SRC="http://www.villagefabrics.co.uk/" SCROLLING="AUTO" NAME="bannerframe" NORESIZE>
</FRAMESET>
<NOFRAMES>

<P>
<DIV ALIGN="CENTER"><A HREF="http://www.villagefabrics.co.uk/">http://villagefabrics.com/</A></DIV>
</NOFRAMES>
</HTML>

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

The problem is, people who only clued in to the Internet in the last few years think that every domain is ".com". Anything that isn't ".com" confuses their pea-sized little brains.

My preferred domain (I have a few) is "robertslaven.ca", but I also got "robertslaven.com" because I know that no matter how many people I tell ".ca" to, a certain percentage will screw up and type in ".com" no matter how many times I tell them.

[robnorth.livejournal.com]

Also, a little rant: Many companies that do business in Canada are subsidiaries of predominantly-US multinationals. Many of them do the sensible thing; the "global" site is ZZZ.com, and the "Canadian" site is ZZZ.ca.

Some of them have the "Canadian" site as ZZZ.com/canada, which I guess isn't so bad.

But Columbia House — the guys who do the mail-order CD's etc. — have the winner for biggest-pain-in-the-butt way of doing it. Their "global/US" site is www.columbiahouse.com (http://www.columbiahouse.com). What's their Canadian site? www.columbiahousecanada.com (http://www.columbiahousecanada.com). Idiots.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

That's in the same league as the company I saw at one point which had multiple FTP servers to choose from when you wanted to download something (perhaps in case one failed, or one was closer to you network-wise, or whatever): ftp.company.com, ftp.company2.com, ftp.company3.com, ftp.company4.com.

Uh, wow.

I also think that something like www.company.de or www.de.company.com (or, as you say, even www.company.com/germany) is better than www.company-germany.com.

Especially the www.de.company.com style is extremely underused, in my (limited) experience, yet it seems a perfect use of DNS subdomains (is that the right term?).