I blame it on the culture, and on the humans who enable it. Agree that it's not *just* the programmer's fault, although in your example below, he must have been semi sedated to write code that catches a non 3/4 character tld, and then pop up an error message; so inefficient :)

It's literally no extra work to change a regular expression match in code. It's a kind of laziness combined with apathy that drives this.

Some developers depend on a dns lookup to determine a valid tld, while others lookup a static list. Poor programming choices, much heartbreak lies in those directions, too.

Ram


On Sep 29, 2016 2:51 PM, "Kurt Pritz" <kurt@kjpritz.com> wrote:
Ram: 

I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the programmer: 

Boss: Hello young man. We have a bit of a problem to solve. Some of our web site users are mis-typing their email addresses. When different government departments need to get hold of them to correct an error on a form they submitted, we cannot. These government departments want us to do a check on their email addresses to at least make sure they are the right format and allowable content. 

Programmer: Sure thing. What's our budget for this?

Boss: Zero.

So, semi-smart solution for no budget.

Kurt

________________
Kurt Pritz
Skype: kjpritz






On Sep 29, 2016, at 12:32 PM, "Jiankang Yao" <yaojk@cnnic.cn> wrote:

Dear Ram,
 
   I think that you can be titled as UA pioneer.
  
 Another 15+ years are needed for UA work.
 
 
 
Jiankang Yao
 
From: Ram Mohan
Date: 2016-09-29 01:50
Subject: [UA-discuss] Some universal acceptance problems last 15+ years...
On Sep 12, 2001, I helped launch the first non 2/3 character TLD, .INFO. Many of you have heard about how we struggled to get applications, browsers, web forms and email systems to recognize the world’s first four-character TLD as a legitimate extension, including my creation of the Office of the CTO (in a 3 person startup) to get large companies to return my calls.

 

Well, 15+ years later, today I was on the website of the Pennsylvania state government, and filled in my email address (ending in .INFO). I hit submit, and here is the prompt that came up. I hit OK, and the site accepted my email and I moved forward with my tasks, but it’s galling that some programmer _recently_ decided that a non 2/3 character TLD based email address merited a warning message.

 

<image001(09-29-10-27-48).png>

 

Goes to show how long bad habits persist. Also goes to show why the UASG’s work is important.

 

-Ram

 

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Ram Mohan
Executive Vice President & CTO
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