Did you know?

The UK has the .uk TLD and not the .gb TLD because when the UK invented their own domain name system, they gave any UK website the uk TLD.

Except… It wasn’t how you think. The UK ordered URLs in reverse to how we do it.

For example, the URL pizza.slice.uk would instead be uk.slice.pizza.

This was also before the subdomains were added, such as co.uk or org.uk meaning that the early websites on the UK’s Internet were just uk.address. 

One of the first websites was that of the British Library, at uk.bl. When the general DNS project came into place, the UK kept the .uk TLD, but all they did was flip the URLs to how we would do it — including legacy ones that didn’t have a subdomain. Which is why the British Library is at bl.uk and not bl.org.uk.

So if the UK had it’s way, we would be writing URLs ‘backwards’ to how we do it!