Royalmail.com
Wednesday, 10 November 2004 08:49![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneI 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.)
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no subject
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 02:25 (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 06:51 (UTC)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*
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 06:56 (UTC)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>.)no subject
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 07:05 (UTC)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
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 07:14 (UTC)(pre bits are also usually rendered in a monospace font.)
no subject
Date: Wednesday, 10 November 2004 06:58 (UTC)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>