Just went to the British Library Online and noticed that the website name is www.bl.uk, is .uk a new web extension? Its the first I have seen of it.
I would say that .uk is old but you can only buy .co.uk domains which are equivalent to .com names and I would say .uk is .gov for the uk since another one is parliament.uk. Well I just looked and there is a .gov.uk so I'm not sure but I have shared my thoughts.
There is co.uk - random sites, gov.uk - govt sites, ac.uk - academic sites, org.uk - oranisations and a few others. Never seen .uk though, just thought it was a bit weird.
Yeah I know, but I was saying that it might be .gov like because only sites with it are the British Library and The Parliment.
Sorry. I misread your previous post! But I suppose you are right, especially because the British Library is run by the government, until the conservatives take power that is.
I think you've both misunderstood how DNS works. They are not separate so having a dns name end in .co.uk is a subset of it ending in .uk - the scheme is hierarchical allowing hosts to appear anywhere in the namespace or whole chunks to be subdelegated. Having hosts appear at the top level is nothing hew - http://www.nic.uk/ has been the nominet site address since they came into existence. At the end of the day anybody who can convince nominet that they have a valid reason for having second level namespace assigned directly under .uk can have it - .bl.uk is identical to .parliament.uk or .co.uk. J
The country code top level domains have all been around for awhile.. Some more in depth reading: http://www.speedguide.net/read_articles.php?id=1574
