For the desperate people whose tests all just broke, I have a page on my public endpoint testing server that exactly reproduces the classic design: https://example.testserver.host/. You can just use update the URL and go back to blissful ignorance.

Also open-source and self-hostable: https://github.com/httptoolkit/testserver. Lots of other endpoints too, full docs here: https://testserver.host/

I'm wondering how many automated tests this change broke.

Yes, I know it's not the example.com's fault, and it's a side effect of Hyrum's Law:

> This is not a service, avoid relying on it for testing and monitoring purposes.

Don't we all have a few fragile tests?

> there's a gradual opacity transition

Looks like they removed this and instead just show all languages with no CSS animation now.

Discussed here a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915060

Kinda interesting that this is getting so much attention.

Ultimately, the example.com domain is just there so you can use it in documentation or code examples. Your expectation about the actual example.com domain should basically be none at all, maybe with the exception that it's hopefully not doing actively malicious things like serving malware or running a catchall mailbox feeding spammers.

Whatever HTML they server or if they serve anything at all... shouldn't matter.

This has rendered my usecase for example.org worthless. I used this website several times per week to clean my glasses as it provided a nearly completely white website - optimal for allowing me to spot smudges on my glasses. It is now black by default for me, or grey.

I am devastated.

The page mentions example.com 14 times and not a single one is a link

> There is no requirement there is a HTTP service present on the host in order to fulfill its purpose, we just operate it as a courtesy.

I guess this is also done to prevent bad actors from abusing the fact that this domain is hit by people who might not know what they're doing (the ones copy-pasting code without reading it)

I appreciate that there must be a lot of traffic hitting this web server so maybe every little bit of savings counts, but I kinda wish the HTML wasn't so heavily compressed.

I remember getting my start with web development by simply reading the source code of sites I found interesting and trying to recreate them. example.com isn't exactly very interesting but it feels like compressing the HTML isn't in the spirit of things either.

On a side note I'd love to see how complicated (or maybe simple) the hosting setup for this site actually is behind the scenes.

I'm not sure I believe that IANA's goal of reducing serving costs is met by a site where each letter is wrapped in a <span>...

separate shower thought: Microsoft have used contoso.com as the example domain in their docs for 25+ years. I bet the logs for that domain are absolutely wild.

> Since most of the traffic to the site is automated it tends not to fetch the Javascript file, reducing overall data requirements.

Well, IATA – give me api.example.com or sniff my user agent and I'll be out of your hair :)

Here is some context: https://kimdavies.com/being-exemplary

This is mine now! <link rel=icon href=data:,>

I’m curious… who hosts and controls this content? IANA? Never really considered this question until now…

So they made a prior tweak to reduce fetches of favicon.ico ( by link rel="icon" href="data:," ) but why do they still serve the overlarge meaningless html page to requests for robots.txt ?!

Given that they have gotten spiked by automated requests lately, aka agents, wouldn't this at least be respected by the big players?

Also, as they are using Cloudflare, wouldn't a discussion (or a note from IANA or CF) about how they configured CF request rejection and how one should love CF's flat rate static serving be appropriate?

Am I missing something?

It's been about 10 years since I last saw this site and accidentally visited it a few days ago and thought "I don't remember it looking like this"

Really funny coincidence, I noticed amazon wasn't loading a couple hours ago. Thought it was my internet so went to example.com to check and noticed the redesign. Figured it was a while ago though.

Maybe this is the most web-development thing possible: even example.com eventually became a frontend project.

> Along with introducing multi-language support, the JavaScript code also inserts an SVG book icon.

Wait - using JS for dynamic content is understandable, but why using it for inserting a static SVG?

It seems that they changed it again and now there is minified HTML with english message + simple script that injects the other languages and the icon, no animation. Which to me seems much more sensible.

I did not know about that empty favicon trick, and I will be adding it to all my base HTML templates for my Flask projects where I get annoyed at all the 404s scrolling past as my browser keeps requesting a favicon that will not exist in that form.

I actually noticed that! I was debugging some HTTP proxy and typed out an HTTP/1.1 request by hand in netcat, and was wondering why I saw a giant blob of dynamic nonsense instead of a small bit of markup.

(This was when it had the language scroll though, I think moving the extras to JS should have resolved that issue; maybe I was misremembering the details too.)

example.com is not a user-facing service. I don't want to disparage the designer, but it's not meant to be pretty. It's meant to be small so you can copy its response to an automated test or visually verify its correctness, or just out of the bandwidth consideration you'd still be serving it to billions of requestors, even if you insist it's not meant to be used that way.

What should I use for example URLs in my testa.

I just wonder how much unintended traffic they receive.

eg If they put DNS, NTP etc on it... Likely billions per hour or something equally ludicrous.

Deluge is likely an exponential understatement.

who's job was it to make incremental stylesheet changes on example.com in the 2010s?

I just don't understand why the operator, IANA, has to use Cloudflare for example.com

It cannot manage a one page website. WTF

There are no page "aseets", no need for images, CSS, etc. It was a text-only website to test connectivity

iana.org forwards to Cloudflare, too

Fortunately the FTP server service still works

Without assistance from a third party

If it's been a sensible decision to use Cloudflare for some period of time then why did IANA wait until now

(Yes, I know they used Akamai in the past)

Ive been using example1.com recently for availability type testing for what its worth.

it's nice, and it surprised me when I saw the redesign.... I use it to navigate into captive wifi portals that always seem to be misconfigured.

Andddd it broke all my EVALs... ;)

the copy on example.com looks llm-generated now...

And example.net!

Previously:

IANA's email about why example.com changed

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49915060

I find the text shown on this site passive agressive.

When a newbie learning programming sees this message, then this is a downer.

"Hello World from example.com [more info]"

Static test is still, IMHO best, but if they want that fancy transition they could at least have used a gif. All that js is terrible overkill.

It's down?

We (IPinfo) have a practice of adopting low-maintenance, high-utility services. Generally, we adopt websites that would have become defunct and run them as services.

Even though IANA says example.com is intended for documentation purposes and not as a service, I feel that it nonetheless serves as a service to the broader internet. I think there are some cornerstone services on the internet, regardless of the maintainers' intentions or their legal definitions.

For example, we ourselves sometimes have to recognize that we are not a standard API service. Considering that we expect to process 3 trillion requests this year, a major outage could take down a good chunk of IT systems everywhere. So, we invested in infrastructure to avoid outages. We then started adopting other cornerstone services and running them indefinitely because we might as well support the users who depend on them because we have infrastructure to support them and us.

[flagged]

IANA, a natural monopoly, can't even host simple html page is kinda funny.

IANA and ICANN should be moved under UN ITU from a non profit, so that they don't make breaking changes without approval.

What would have been nice is that depending on the visitors IP address’s region, showing a localised message instead of fixed number of languages