[EvanAnderson]

My county government started w/ a "co.Name.oh.us" domain name back in the late 90s. People in the government hated it. The complaint I heard most frequently was that the public couldn't get it right-- too many dots.

I was a fan of the ".co.name.oh.us" naming because it made logical sense. I could easily find any County website in the state. My intuition now is that anything logical (or, perhaps, just anything I like) will be hated by the public. >sigh<

The county moved to "NameCountyOhio.gov". It's 5 characters longer than the old domain name but isn't hated. The public still gets it wrong often, expecting it to be "NameCountyOH.gov".

Edit:

Okay, so I got this totally wrong. Chalk it up to poor memory for stuff 20+ years ago.

There's RFC 1480, first of all: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1480

The old County domain was "co.name.oh.us". I completely forgot the hierarchy was flipped for localities, with the locality being the higher level domain and the designation for type of locality (city, county, etc) being second.

For K-12 school districts, libraries, colleges, and others, the hierarchy comes first (like "name.lib.oh.us").

[abtinf]

[countyname].co.[stateabbr].[ctld] is injecting ontological metadata into the data, which is bizarre.

Would be better to just get rid of the “co” layer.

[EvanAnderson]

There are separate hierarchies for cities (".ci.oh.us", school districts (".k12.oh.us"), public libraries (".lib.oh.us"), and probably others I'm not aware of. It seems like there could be name collisions between those different entities that would necessitate the additional layer.

Edit:

Per my parent comment I screwed this up and misremembered the hierarchies. The locality name comes first for localities, so you'd be looking at things like:

ci.medina.oh.us - City of Medina

co.medina.oh.us - County of Medina

medina.k12.oh.us - The Medina City School District

medina.lib.oh.us - The Medina County District Library

[abtinf]

So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties, and most entities (cities, districts, etc) exist within counties.

Maybe there should be a “falsehoods programmers believe about government structure” article, but I can think of very few exceptions.

“cleveland.cuyahoga.ohio.gov” seems like a logically guessable domain.

[EvanAnderson]

Oh, I agree. It's logically guessable and the right hierarchy. It'd also never fly. >smile<

> So far as I am aware, every US state is split into counties...

re: falsehoods - Alaska has no counties. Louisiana has "Parishes". Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments. Also, see Townships.

[xp84]

Sometimes I think our country would be better understood as 50-something separate countries, kind of like the EU, except without the general goal the EU has of increasing amounts of cooperation and convergence. Since in America, everything that’s different from one place to another is generally different because somebody very influential wants it to be. As programmers I feel like all this inconsistency drives us crazy because it seems pointless, but as a citizen, I can see how it would be a tremendous waste of effort to try to force national standardization merely for standardization’s sake when we have so many real problems that need to be addressed.

[201984]

Virginia is another edge case here, where cities aren't part of counties and are directly under the state. If you look at a map, you'll see holes in a bunch of counties where the cities are, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_and_counties_...

[mistrial9]

All of these are tiny exceptions compared to the vast number of counties within US States. However, reality is made of exceptions! All things considered, it is interesting and important to have local exceptions in a nation IMHO.

[abtinf]

> Connecticut and Rhode Island have counties but no county governments

This breaks my brain.

[bombcar]

And even where everything seems the same on paper, different states can handle things wildly differently.

Some the counties run almost everything except where a large city is, some the county does almost nothing, and everything is tied to whatever the biggest town is.

[saalweachter]

I'm always a little bit angry that New York calls Townships Towns.

[saalweachter]

New York spans five counties, which lack county governments, instead having borough governments subordinate to the city government.

Washington, DC is a city which is in neither a state nor a county.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._municipalities_... has a hundred or so cities that span counties.

[mistrial9]

it turns out, cities are among the least well-defined geographical features in local government of the USA. There are many odd and unusual arrangements at the city level. The US Census maintains a collection of more clearly defined entities.

[dragonwriter]

I can think of lots of exceptions to the part about substate public entities existing within counties; CA, for instance, has quite a number of JPAs and similar entities that involve multiple counties, or entities from multiple counties, for some purpose; e.g., The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, etc.

[adrianmonk]

You can't get rid of the "co". It's needed for disambiguation.

For example, here in Texas, the City of Dallas is located in Dallas County, but they are separate things. If you want to pay a parking ticket that you got in the City of Dallas, you need to go to the city's web site. If you want to pay your property taxes, you need to go to the county's web site.

Also, the City of Austin is located in Travis County. There is an Austin County, but it's 100 miles (160 km) away. The only connection is that they are both named for Stephen F. Austin.

[xp84]

Interesting. Here in CA we have a few fused “City and County of X” governments. In those cases, the borders are one and the same, and there is only one governmental entity in charge of it. Mostly, this is convenient.

[abtinf]

Actually I just looked at the original post, which indicates that both oh.gov and ohio.gov exist. Ohio.gov actually works.

So countyname.ohio.gov would be perfect.

[EvanAnderson]

The city of Medina Ohio, Medina County Ohio, and the Medina City School District have entered the chat.

[abtinf]

County: medina.ohio.gov

City: medina.medina.ohio.gov

From brief googling, the school district is subordinate to the county, not the city, despite its name.

medinacityschools.medina.ohio.gov

Or

cityschools.medina.ohio.gov

Or

mcc.medina.ohio.gov

Or

bees.medina.ohio.gov

[BobaFloutist]

What would you do for the City and County of San Francisco? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

Do they get two separate websites?

[xp84]

(I’m not OP but) Since there is only one entity, you would probably create a simple website redirect for the redundant lower level, and keep everything (web, email) at the domain (the one that would have been a “county” anywhere else). E.g. sf.ca.gov

[EvanAnderson]

> medina.medina.ohio.gov

I love this so much.

It makes me sad that Buffalo, NY is in Erie County. That could have been great.