Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.

School districts are often supersets of municipalities.

This is the correct answer.

From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:

  "Public schools are usually organized by districts 
  which can be larger or smaller than a city or county."
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12

What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.

It's said this way because the default assumption is that a school district extends only to city or county lines. They can be larger or smaller, though.

"can be" ≠ "must be"

"can be" is used to list all possible values, which is where the confusion arises. It sounds like: ∀x, x>C v x<C.

"Might be", I think would be better.

"can" can be a synonym for "might" / "may"

(purists would argue that it can't, but common usage trumps purism)

Also, I will point out that, even from the perspective of formal logic, the original statement has "city or county". In other words there is no single fixed C - C could be a city or a country. Since counties can be larger than cities, it stands to reason that a school district could be larger than the size of a city while being equal to the size of a county. And can be smaller than the size of a county while being equal to the size of a city.

So, even assuming that the original statement is taken to have the logical meaning you've interpreted, that meaning does not technically forbid school districts from being equal to the size of a county (as long as that county is larger than some city, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is larger than a city"), nor from being equal to the size of a city (as long as that city is smaller than some county, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is smaller than a county").

MAY is the correct choice.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

This is not in the context of a requirement level. The definition of MAY as defined there makes no sense here.

My local school district somehow has <schooldistrict>.us

Not sure how that came about.

I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".

One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).

I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.

The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)

I'm still mildly annoyed every time usps.gov redirects me to usps.com

Once you stop thinking of domain as an addressing tool and start thinking of them as branding, the complaints will make sense. "Dot k12 dot oh dot us" is a terrible brand name.

I have a hard time with public dollars going to "branding" but I do recognize it's a concern for some people and I'm a vastly minority opinion.

Everything needs branding. "United States of America" and "USA" is branding. Good branding makes people's lives easier and (on average) a tiny bit happier. That has some impact on quality of life. Spending a few tax dollars on improving people's QOL is a good thing if you ask me.

As a specific example, imagine how many less people would enroll in Medicare if instead it was called Lifelong Assistance in Meeting Medical Needs of Aging Able-Bodied Population. Just finding eligibility criteria and the correct forms to submit would be 10 times harder.

(I think it would be even better if Medicare and Medicaid weren't so similar and easy to confuse with one another. Recently I had to explain both concepts to an immigrant who knew about neither but found contradictory information online about both.)

Public dollars or not, it IS branding.

Having a strong, consistent, easy to use name IS a positive.

It’s easy to remember, which means more “engagement”. For a local government organization, that means more support, more feedback, and the constituents are “getting their moneys worth” more than a government organization that they can’t ever interact with.

It’s a clear win for using your dollars BETTER

Why would you have a problem with public dollars being used for effective communication?

.gov should never have been expanded to outside the US federal government.

(.com should never have been expanded to outside US-headquartered companies, either.)

I'm actually in favor of it, because it makes it much more clear what is a government address, versus what is a private address in the US. But .gov should have been broken up into .state.gov address so you could very easily guess the address of your local governments website. Like why is the site for Los Angeles lacity.gov and not losangeles.ca.gov? Why is the Ohio secretary of state not sos.oh.gov? These should all be well known address, so if I move to a new state, I can just go to the web site, and do whatever registration I need to without having to hunt for these addresses.

The second is hard to justify unless you are willing to say .com should have been replaced with .com.us

Agreed on both.

mayo.k12.sc.us was my high school. It seems a shame they're not still using it.

Seeing the .k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool.*

When I was in my wandering days before there were search engines, I would always enter http://travel.state.*st*.us, or http://travel.*st*.us to look up tourism web sites.

It was unusual for a city or state to not have a travel.city.state.us, or travel.state.us domain.

Our school and town dropped all the .mi.us domains and they have their own domains now, why would they do that? I know it used to be k12 too.

They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo is basically perfectly accurate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)