yesterday at 11:52 PM
We (IPinfo) have a practice of adopting low-maintenance, high-utility services. Generally, we adopt websites that would have become defunct and run them as services.
Even though IANA says example.com is intended for documentation purposes and not as a service, I feel that it nonetheless serves as a service to the broader internet. I think there are some cornerstone services on the internet, regardless of the maintainers' intentions or their legal definitions.
For example, we ourselves sometimes have to recognize that we are not a standard API service. Considering that we expect to process 3 trillion requests this year, a major outage could take down a good chunk of IT systems everywhere. So, we invested in infrastructure to avoid outages. We then started adopting other cornerstone services and running them indefinitely because we might as well support the users who depend on them because we have infrastructure to support them and us.
today at 12:05 AM
I think what you describe is exactly right, it has organically become a service and it is maintained with that in mind. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be clear about what its for and what should be avoided. Otherwise it is setting up an implicit contract that it will service those needs without limitation which turns it into an even bigger dependency.
yesterday at 11:39 PM
Discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915060
yesterday at 11:13 PM
> there's a gradual opacity transition
Looks like they removed this and instead just show all languages with no CSS animation now.
yesterday at 11:26 PM
> There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.
I guess this is also done to prevent bad actors from abusing the fact that this domain is hit by people who might not know what they're doing (the ones copy-pasting code without reading it)
today at 12:06 AM
More the DNS and DNSSEC and the like. Whether or not there is actually an HTTP server responding is irrelevant to whether or not those securely point anywhere but a malicious system.
today at 12:00 AM
I don't understand, what risk would there be if they chose _not_ to run serve a site?
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Yeah there’s definitely a lot of sensitive data that gets sent to the domain just because of people not changing configs
yesterday at 11:29 PM
> Along with introducing multi-language support, the JavaScript code also inserts an SVG book icon.
Wait - using JS for dynamic content is understandable, but why using it for inserting a static SVG?
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Simple answer is the article is wrong, I tried it with disabled JS and still see the SVG.
The whole article reads like something put together with AI, so maybe it’s not too surprising.
today at 12:09 AM
I get nothing but a gray page with the following with JS disabled https://i.imgur.com/81aYPeB.png in Firefox via javascript.enabled set to false.
yesterday at 11:47 PM
You may want to check your settings again or clear you cache as there is definitely a `s.js`[0] file that inserts the `<svg>` element into the HTML DOM[1], which you can see does not contain the element itself.
0
```
var B = document.body, P, p; B.children[0].insertAdjacentHTML("afterend", "<p lang=ar dir=rtl>هذا النطاق مُخصص للاستخدام في أمثلة التوثيق دون الحاجة إلى إذن. هذه ليست خدمة، يُرجى تجنب الاعتماد عليها لأغراض الاختبار والمراقبة.</p><p lang=zh>该域名仅用于文档示例，无需获得许可。这并非一项服务，请勿将其用于测试和监控目的。</p><p lang=fr>L’usage de ce domaine est réservé à des exemples de documentation, sans autorisation préalable. Il ne s’agit pas d’un service ; son utilisation à des fins de test ou de surveillance est à éviter.</p><p lang=ru>Данный домен предназначен для использования в примерах документации без необходимости получения предварительного разрешения. Это не сервис; не рекомендуется его использование для тестирования и мониторинга.</p><p lang=es>Este dominio está destinado al uso en ejemplos de documentación sin necesidad de permiso. Esto no es un servicio; evitar utilizarlo para realizar pruebas o monitoreos.</p><a href=https://iana.org/help/example-domains>Learn more</a>"); P = [...B.querySelectorAll("p")]; P[0].lang = "en"; navigator.languages.some(l => p = P.find(p => p.lang == l.split("-")[0])); p = p || P[0]; B.prepend(p); B.insertAdjacentHTML("afterbegin", '<style>svg{display:block;margin:-2.75em auto 0;opacity:.55}p+p{font-size:.875em;opacity:.6}</style><svg viewBox=0,0,20,20 width=44 height=44 fill=currentColor aria-hidden=true><path fill=none stroke=currentColor stroke-width=1.3 stroke-linejoin=round d="M6 4H3v12q4 0 7 1.5-1-3.5-4-4.5V2q3.5 1 4 3v12.5q3-1.5 7-1.5V4q-4.5 0-7 1"/><g transform=rotate(-6,13.6,8.3)><path id=q d="M11.5 6.6h1.8v1.8l-1 1.6-.6-.3.8-1.3h-1z"/><use href=#q x=2.4 /></g></svg>')
```
1
```
<!doctype html> <html lang=en> <head> <meta charset=utf-8> <link rel=icon href=data:,> <meta name=viewport content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1"> <title>Example Domain</title> <style> html { color-scheme: light dark; background: light-dark(#eee,#222) }
body {
font: 16px/1.6 system-ui,sans-serif;
max-width: 26em;
margin: auto;
padding: 25vh 2em 2em;
text-align: center
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>This domain is for use in documentation examples without needing permission. This is not a service; avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.</p>
<script src=/s.js></script>
</body>```
yesterday at 11:23 PM
I’m curious… who hosts and controls this content? IANA? Never really considered this question until now…
yesterday at 11:27 PM
who's job was it to make incremental stylesheet changes on example.com in the 2010s?
today at 12:10 AM
The government. It was a top secret skunkworks project to see if centering a <div> was possible.
yesterday at 11:06 PM
What would have been nice is that depending on the visitors IP address’s region, showing a localised message instead of fixed number of languages
yesterday at 11:12 PM
I think the whole point is for it to be a static site that is easily distributed with little-to-no overhead, as it probably receives a non-trivial amount of traffic.
yesterday at 11:28 PM
Yep, that's exactly their reasoning:
> As it tends to be heavily trafficked, the overall bandwidth is a key consideration
yesterday at 11:18 PM
This feels like a “falsehood developers think about localization.”
It’s always funny when I get French YouTube ads. As if YouTube is desperately trying to offload the adbuys anywhere they can by pretending that Canada must mean French.
yesterday at 11:28 PM
Just check the Accept-Language header
yesterday at 11:20 PM
I believe it's just using the official languages of the UN
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Interesting, didn’t know that. Also I would have expected German and Hindi to be official UN languages given the number of native speakers in the world
yesterday at 11:54 PM
Guess most of German speaking and Hindi speaking also know English.
yesterday at 11:11 PM
it's nice, and it surprised me when I saw the redesign.... I use it to navigate into captive wifi portals that always seem to be misconfigured.
yesterday at 11:12 PM
It's down?