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by koliber 3124 days ago
The article outlines two options. There is a third.

Lobby google through petitions and collective developer action to surrender their .dev TLD and create an RFC that makes it reserved for developer used, similarly to .example and .test.
2 comments
borkabrak 3124 days ago
I'm not sure a strong case can be made that Google should be obliged to do that. There already exist TLD suffixes reserved for testing. ".dev" just isn't one of them.
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koliber 3123 days ago
I would beg to differ. As you've mentioned, there exists an official TLD suffix. However, de facto, .dev is the testing TLD. I've never seen .example or .invalid in real life. I've seen a tiny bit of .test. At every job that had a test dev, we used .dev. In many cases that decision was made by other developers. Judging by the comments here, and the article, it seems that many people have been using it.

A case can be made. How strong it will be remains to be seen. I hope Google can see the greater good in this. They have a lot of good will to win amongst the developer community.

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jsmthrowaway 3124 days ago
Except, as you point out, .example and .test exist (and should have been used for this). What's the technical justification for the third?

Remember when APNIC got 1/8 from IANA and had to go test what would happen if they announced 1.2.3.4 to the Internet? Just because something has been done historically doesn't mean we need to ban it entirely from the future.

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koliber 3123 days ago
There is no technical justification. There is a strong culture and habit of using .dev as the development TLD. It has not been codified and accepted formally.

Developers are humans. Technical justification is one of the things that should be considered when making decisions. There are many others.

Developers have not been widely using .example and .test as the spec recommends. They have been using .dev. It makes sense for it to be added as a reserved testing TLD. No one can force Google to do it. We can just petition them and hope that they do the right thing.

There is a lot of goodwill that Google can gain by allowing free use of `.dev`. Even more if they propose a spec to add it to the reserved domains. I would imagine it would be at least $185,000 worth of goodwill.

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