In the early years, the Internet was primarily U.S.-centric. Top-level domain names like . com and . edu were set up and then country names were added. Originally it was designed that the U.S. would have a .us at the end. By the time the geographical ones were introduced, people had been using the organizational domains for so long that few U.S. companies or people were willing to change. So, in the U.S., organizational domains are used, and everywhere else, geographical domains are used, except where non-U.S. companies have purchased organizational domains. So, ".us" is used primarily by local schools and local governments in the United States.
But as always with the Internet, there are exceptions to the rules. For example, most U.S. federal government sites use . gov as their top-level domain. Or, if a company got onto the Internet late and found their domain name was taken, in many cases they tried to get .net or .org if .com was no longer available. That leads to some confusion. If you cannot find the company you are looking for with . com, check out . net or . org. Be aware that early Internet advocates grabbed up thousands of domain names with the idea of later selling them to the companies that actually use the name. The U.S. Congress had to step in and pass legislation requiring companies that regularly use the company name in business to get first access to the proper domain name.
Nonetheless, many companies were already established as .net and . o rg domains. In addition, some scammers bought up hundreds of domain names. They guessed that some people would make typing mistakes and others would not know the difference between a . gov and a . com and so would accidentally go to the . com. site. Most of those were X-rated sites and they set up revenue streams based on the number of hits to the website. WhiteHouse.com is the most notorious example.
Some two-letter country codes have different meanings based on language. In the United States, television stations wanted to have the easy to remember . tv at the end of their domain name. The extension . tv is the geographic designation for the little country of Tuvalu. To generate revenue for its government, Tuvalu began selling the domain name to companies around the world. The country code belongs to that country and they can do with it what they want. For the most part, they have used them for companies within their nation. Several more valuable codes are: . to for the small South Pacific nation of Tonga, . i t for the country of Italy, and .md for the country of Moldova. Moldova has established an arrangement to license .md domain names to medical doctors.
One good trick is: when you get an error message or a "cannot reach that website" notice, take the address and work backwards toward the domain name, removing the text between the slashes one part at a time. This is known as truncating. For example, here is an unusual photo at a website that has a long URL: www.comedyzone. net/pictures/animals/animals40 .htm. What if the webmaster were to change the URL of this webpage, perhaps shuffling the page to another part of the website, which could give that page a new URL? If that were to happen, you would get a generic "page not found" message instead of the lion ... and, no fun.
Using the old URL, you "truncate" by working backwards toward the domain name slash (for example, start by deleting "animals40 .htm") and your browser may eventually find and open a page. Let us say you truncate all the way back to Comedy-zone.net - and from that page, you may be able to find the page you were looking for. Click on "Funny Pictures," then "Funny Animal Pictures," then down the list to #40, which is titled "Oops" and click on that to bring up the lion picture page - that is, unless the webmaster has "moved" it. Keep in mind, too, that webpages can be deleted from a site, and this is particularly true of news sites. If you see a tilde (~), it means the website resides on a UNIX system - most often used at universities - and is most likely contained in the home directory of someone on that system.
Our website is not responsible for the information contained by this article. Webworldarticles.com is a free articles resource thus practically any visitor can submit an article. However if you notice any copyrighted material, please contact us and we will remove the article(s) in discussion right away.
This article was sent to us by:
Stephan Errols at
08212010
1. Understanding better what an IP address is
All articles in this directory are property of their respective authors. Additionally, read our Privacy Policy
© 2010 WebWorldarticles.com - All Rights Reserved. Partners: Gunblade Saga