Ever wonder where MIME types come from?

May 13, 2003 - 5:41pm — bmann

It turns out that IANA (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is also responsible for registering MIME types.

You can also go to IANA to find out who/what owns various top-level domains (TLDs) and the various ccTLDs (country code TLDs). My dreams of registering canada.eh were dashed when I found out that Western Sahara owns .eh. And they don't have a registry.

What was I doing? I was working on a PHP script that will set a file for download, setting the header "Content-Type" to the specific type of file. In my case, a comma-separated value (CSV) file. Closest thing is application/vnd.ms-excel, which is probably where I want it to end up anyways.

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May 17, 2003 - 5:28am — Anonymous

Top-Level Domains?

We can always go after canada.duh if all else fails...

Todd

Question: Is it really Top-level Domans as mentioned above? If so, I doubt I know any...

May 18, 2003 - 11:39am — bmann

Very funny

And also that you're the only one that caught that spelling mistake. It's fixed now.

May 17, 2003 - 8:36pm — GSoo

dot CA, dot UK, etc. are country code TLDs

as laid down in RFC 1591. IANA, the body which manages the v4 and v6 IP address spaces by delegating to sub-entities, also delegates management of country-code TLDs. It reflects the volunteer & bare-bones spirit in which the administration of the Internet was originally setup.

May 14, 2003 - 5:30pm — GSoo

P.S. could submit a proposal

to become the registrar for the Western Sahara TLD. You bizplan wud b to market it to fiercely patriotic Canadians.eh, all ten of them.

May 15, 2003 - 5:07am — bmann

Tricky part is finding who is in power

Yes, I thought of that. I'm thinking that the cost would outweight any potential earnings, and that it would be horrendously difficult to track down someone "in charge" in Western Sahara.

I still think it would be a neat marketing idea, but in general I'm not one for random TLDs just because your name is taken...good content and a high Google search ranking will always trump a specific domain name.

May 16, 2003 - 3:10pm — GSoo

This must be the only untended cc.TLD

Western Sahara is a former Spanish colony and is in a jurisdictional dispute with Morocco. In the unlikely event you'd want to do this, I can get you contacts at the U.N. to chase these guys down.