A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked with some guys who put together an incredible proposal to ICANN for a new .geo TLD: http://www.ai.sri.com/dotgeo/
The proposal was not accepted, but .aero and .museum were, and we all now how those have since utterly revolutionized the internet.
Neat! Speaking of galaxy far, far away, the executive summary only mentions other planets in passing. I couldn't quite grok from scanning how you might access cells from the moon with this TLD.
.aero may be questionable, but surely the boundless usefulness of .ninja or .moe isn't in dispute?
yeah, those came a little later, but 2000 was the first year ICANN was ready to accept proposals for TLDs beyond the original 7. They made a call for innovative new uses of the domain system. My colleagues proposed .geo, ICANN went with .biz, .info, .name, .pro, .aero, .coop, and .museum.
Oh, I was joking about .moe, etc - I reckon .geo would be far more useful!
But my main question about the moon was quite serious - how would you access the moon with this? I couldn't quite understand how this part from the executive summary would translate to an actual DNS request:
"One special GeoRegistry must have a server assigned to every cell on the planet. This GeoRegistry will be called the default GeoRegistry named "earth." (The names of the other planets will be reserved for interplanetary geodata.) The default GeoRegistry will be used when client queries do not specify a GeoRegistry name, or when the specified GeoRegistry does not have an assigned cell server."
Kinda cool that .geo predates Google Maps by about 4 or 5 years!
those were great times... sadly, the Principal Investigator passed away, one of the lead devs left the company for greener (for-profit) pastures, and the program was de-funded when DARPA priorities shifted post-9/11 and it all just kinda evaporated.
re: the moon - I honestly forget how that part was supposed to work....
I may be being naive, but how is that different than including Google Maps JS lib on your page? I assume that component is just a wrapper around the GMaps JS lib?
The proposal was not accepted, but .aero and .museum were, and we all now how those have since utterly revolutionized the internet.