[DNSOP] Re: Call for Adoption: draft-davies-internal-tld

[Michael De Roover <[e-mail]>]

On Tuesday, May 6, 2025 9:53:40 AM CEST Philip Homburg wrote:
> This is getting off topic because how an 'omnibar' works is not part of this
> working group. But it does raise the question, do browsers react differently
> depending on whether a name is present in the root or not?
> 
> If I type foo.internal in a web browser does it react differently from, say,
> foo.amsterdam.
> 
> I tried for my browser (Firefox) and got the same result. But maybe other
> browsers different.

Fair enough, browsers and omnibars should not be the only applications that 
this applies to, it would be rather irrelevant if so. But I do think that 
there are other applications that this applies to if the question is "how do I 
make my application determine what is a domain and what is not".

Take instant messaging applications, or even email clients for example. Or 
even word processors / office suites. When we paste a link in there, how does it 
determine that to be a link? The text that is inserted is still just plain 
text. Maybe it starts with http or https, that's a good heuristic because 
those are protocols. Or maybe it ends in a TLD, like .amsterdam or another 
public delegation. But what if it is .internal, should that be recognized as 
akin to .amsterdam, or as a TLD that isn't recognized like .lan?

As an application developer, where would you find that list of domains that are 
globally recognized, and combine it with those that are domains but are for 
whatever reason "special"? In that way, our web browsers did consider .onion 
to be a domain name, even though it is not meant to exist in the traditional 
sense. So the code would've made the decision that such domains are not search 
queries.

So that is the decision that I would want applications dealing with domain 
names to be able to make for .internal. Is that a domain name and how do we 
handle this special case?

-- 
Met vriendelijke groet,
Michael De Roover

Mail: [e-mail]
Web: michael.de.roover.eu.org