[ih] Dot Com etc

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 09:39:20PM -0000, John Levine wrote:
> I think that all changed when Mosaic or maybe Netscape treated "foo"
> in the address box as "foo.com".  So I guess it's Marc Andreesen's
> fault.

Hrm.  I suspect that conflates correspondence and cause.  I think an
equally good explanation for why Mozilla did that was because most
sites were in fact .com sites, and the Mozilla programmers were trying
to be helpful to people who didn't understand the DNS.  (Not that it
was a good idea.  The programmers didn't understand the DNS either --
witness the mess the cookies spec made.  I'm just not sure you have
the causal arrow pointing the right way.)

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at crankycanuck.ca