Hello fellow posters,
I recently posted a new web site and copy/pasted some code from a tutorial page into my .htaccess, and
forgot to change the domain name to the one belonging to my site.
So I ended up with a 404 error on
domain.com,
followed by advertising. There is a lot of documentation out there that uses "domain.com" as their example domain name, and the owner of domain.com is just rolling in the dough as the advertising dollars keep on coming!
Someone could also slip a mickey in on you when you visit his domain, because of its use in documentation, following the same mistake I made. It is very simple to serve up a virus, malware, some kind of money-making scheme upon the unwary.
This is why there are some domains set aside specifically for documentation purposes. These are
example.com, example.org and
example.net (which see).
You can insert any subdomain before these domain names and you can add any /path/structure/ of your choice after.
I saw an Apache documentation recently that used commercially-available domain names as
example1.com and
example2.org. These fall into the same category as
domain.com,
yoursite.com and others
that are available for registration.
This Apache documentation could have done a 1.example.com and 2.example.org, and been on safe ground, simply because, as I said, you can add any subdomain before these examples.
There is another top-level domain that you may use to bring about a site-not-found error, for there will never be a site registered under this top-level domain:
.invalid
See
www.example.invalid for a sample.
It has been awhile since I saw the web sites at example.com et al, and IANA has posted new information on these exaample sites.
It used to be that an Apache server would just accept whatever subdomain and path you threw at it, and had a one-liner stating that these domains have been set aside for documentation purposes, and identify itself as Apache server version number at
www.example.com port 80, if it was
www.example.com that you visited.
Hazards in using commercially-available domains in documentation
