There is yet another update of libtld. This time the effective_tld_names.dat file included many new gTLDs, even some that are not yet, but will very soon be official.

It also included many corrections to existing country domain names such as .uk which is now available as a first level domain name, and .ve which changed quite a bit too.

There are also a few domains that were removed (now marked deprecated) such as 4 .us and 2 .ru sub-domains.

As per the list from Mozilla, there are quite a few new sub-domains used as main domain names by various businesses such as a few amazonaws and a new 2nd level .us name.

I also moved a couple of names that are business opportunities and not offered by their respective countries.

I am now really thinking that all the domain names should include a full definition of their origin, what purpose they serve and a set of tags to categorize them. XML is quite appropriate for that purpose, with an Apache server it would be fairly easy to whip out a web based tool to edit each entry without having to edit a large text file by hand as now. This way an extension such as .com.ar could at the same time be labelled as Commercial and Country.

Similarly, we could also offer a set of regular expressions that could be used to verify the rest of the name as per the registration capabilities. For example, some domain names cannot include UTF-8 characters. Others will only accept a very small sub-set of characters and we should be checking for those to full validate a URI.