[profmonocle]

> Some cities may also use a subdomain of their states domain, which may or may not be a .gov.

This reminds me of how longwinded the domain hierarchy for .us originally was. In MN (not sure if it's the same for every state), city domains were "www.ci.cityname.mn.us". Then the school district's web site was "www.cityname.k12.mn.us". Not only was the order inconsistent (why not www.k12.cityname etc.?) but sometimes the city might be typed differently - i.e. the main Minneapolis site had "minneapolis" in the domain, but the school district had "mpls".

In the primordial days of the web, back before good search engines, this didn't make it very easy to find the school's web site.

Fortunately many governments realized this and moved once .gov became available to cities & states. (or they just used .org). For instance Minneapolis uses minneapolismn.gov, but many are still on the old style domains. The school district uses mpls.k12.mn.us, but at least they've dropped the "www."

[semi-extrinsic]

In Norway, people employed by the local municipalities have email adresses that are literally of the style

  $firstname[.$middlename].$lastname@employee.$municipalityName.municipality.no  

where "employee" and "municipality" are literal strings (in Norwegian) and the others are variables. It's incredible, I've seen people with 50 character long email addresses.

[bewuethr]

If you want to reschedule your Canadian citizenship ceremony, this is the address to email: [e-mail]

[mikepurvis]

Looks like part of that might be attempting to craft a bilingual email address? This kind of thing is tough to get right— in many cases the easiest thing is to just make up a word that's understandable in both languages but isn't obviously preferential to either, like how the transit agency in Ottawa is called "OC Transpo".

On the other hand, for email addresses in particular, it should be easy to just have one in each language, which also makes sense in terms of the person replying knowing upfront which language you'd like to use based on which address your query came in on.

[rapunkill]

They could/should just use an alias where both email address point to the same inbox and would solve that issue in 2 minutes.

[scrollaway]

Exactly. Belgium is trilingual and just makes aliases, even to domain names.

[mijamo]

Why is that incredible? It is pretty common for many institutions to have that kind of email. Universities for instance often have similar emails so that just by looking at the email you know if the person is a teacher / student / temp worker and which chair they belong to, sometimes which campus in addition.

Many big companies have similar things to identify the BU of the email holder or indicate a contractor status (helpful for security policies).

[semi-extrinsic]

I don't know, I guess in the industries I work it's much more common to have emails that are somewhat unpredictable, like [e-mail]

[wbl]

Some unis. I had the three letter username (helps my name starts with W) at Berkeley. You could pick anything you wanted.

[blackearl]

it's not common to have such a long email

[markovbot]

those are called .us locality domains.

ci.<locality name>.<state>.us is assigned to the city, there are several other similarly non-obvious assignments, anyone is permitted to register one.

I found this page that talks about it more: http://telecafe.org/smw/.US_Locality_Domains

[zeckalpha]

More confusingly, our legislature has used a Mongolian domain name. Looks like they (mostly) have redirects set up now: http://www.leg.mn

[jimktrains2]

School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.

[dragonwriter]

> School districts are separate from municipalities and often will span multiple.

School districts may or may not be subordinate to city or county governments, and this may not be consistent state wide (of course, he heirarchy of city vs county may not be consistent statewide—looking at NYC.)

[krallja]

School districts are not always subsets of cities. Sometimes they even cross town, county, parish, or township lines.