>> If you test that the TLD exists... it will still work. > Only if A) you are always online with B) reliable access to the > tld's nameserver/s, and C) can deal with the latency. In practice > this is often not the case.
Even under the most wildly optimistic scenarios, it's hard to imagine new TLDs being added more than once a month, and I presume that everyone here already knows how easy it is to get copies of the root zone. The reasonable way to validate TLDs is to fetch a copy of the zone every couple of weeks and cache it. By the way, to be sure we're all on roughly the same page, here's a quiz. How many names are there in the root zone right now? a) 11 b) 97 c) 153 d) 280 e) 974 Regards, John Levine, [EMAIL PROTECTED], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.