You may have heard, read about, or even seen (gasp!) that the first .XXX Web site in the .XXX Top-Level Domain (TLD) has gone live. I personally believe the TLD is quite useless, but that’s beside the point.

Be that as it may, if you are a developer it is becoming increasingly important you review your (probably incorrect) regular expressions for validating e-mail or Web addresses in your app’s enter your e-mail address here field. A lot of these have hardcoded .{com|net|org} and a few country-codes for the ccTLDs, but that’s about it.

A simple DNS query can determine whether the domain or TLD entered as part of a sign-up process exists, and in fact, ICANN has a collection of functions for a variety of programming languages to help you along. Don’t worrry: there’s nothing very fancy or difficult in there.