Internet Explorer 3.0 will expand teledesic into http://teledesic but
not into http://www.teledesic.com.
OK, I will now argue why Microsoft has made the correct decision here,
and I'm not just saying this because Bill funds my exhorbinant
lifestyle. ;-)
The singular .com commercial international Top Level Domain (iTLD) is
going away, to be replaced by dozens (hundreds?) of different domains
like .biz, .bus, and, of course, .xxx. If I were not in Geneva (best
achieved modem speed: 4800 bps), I would give you the link to Jon
Postel's Internet Draft describing this idea. The InterNIC will soon
lose it's monopoly on commercial iTLDs, and the free market will reign
in commercial registries.
So, while the global, broadband networking company Teledesic might
expand to www.teledesic.com, the shoe-insole-manufacturer-in-Dubai
Teledesic (if there were one) might be www.teledesic.bus.
Overall point: domain names are not a large enough name space to
reliably substitute for a real directory service (because there's both
an Acme shipping and an Acme supermarket), so Netscape shouldn't pretend
they can.
(BTW, I'm not brainwashed enough yet to argue that Microsoft thought
this all the way out when deciding how to handle non-FQDNs.)
- dan
-- Dan Kohn <dan@teledesic.com> Teledesic Corporation +1-206-803-1411 (voice) 803-1404 (fax) http://www.teledesic.com
<khare@w3.org> (Rohit Khare) wrote:
>>>[...prepend "www." by default, append ".com", prepend http://, &c...]
>Note that *real* browsers like OmniWeb already do this.. Unlike the Wintel >shit I'm being forced to use these days.