MegaMaster Musings

Mega Man .NET
October 23, 2003

And now, for a little satire...

I just thought I’d take the opportunity to clear up an issue. Even though MMHP’s address is www.mmhp.net, MMHP has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft’s “.NET” architecture. It is very confusing, I freely admit, but it completely due to Microsoft being lame and grabbing onto the whole “dot com” phenomenon and choosing a rather stupid name for their Java replacement. It’s also very irritating, because trying to do a search for information about .NET on the WWW invariably turns up any mention of a website which happens to end in “.net”—99.9% of which have no relevance whatsoever on the .NET technology. My hat off to the people who decided the .NET name—brilliant, folks, absolutely brilliant.

(End satire.)

Seriously, MMHP uses “www.mmhp.net” as its address primarily because there was no other very good choice. The address “www.mmhp.com” was already taken, but even if it hadn’t been, MMHP isn’t a company and thus .com doesn’t really fit. Likewise, .org was a possiblity, and one I considered for a while, but MMHP isn’t an organization either, nor is it run by one. A more appropriate extension would probably be .info, but such wasn’t available at the time that I registered for the domain name. I finally settled on .net because, although MMHP isn’t truly a network, it can be thought of as a network of information in a way, and anyway, I had to pick something, so there you go.

As an aside, people might ask “why didn’t you do www.megaman.com or something?” Simply put, because I consider that to be trademark infringement (morally speaking, whether the law considers it as such or not). When a consumer goes to “www.megaman.com” he would logically expect an official website made by Capcom. I am not that and will never claim to be that (unless it ever becomes the truth—ha ha!), and I refuse to mislead people by using a name that is guaranteed to do just that. This may be a fine distinction, but “Mega Man Home Page” sounds much more like a fan-site to me than “megaman.com” (but as far as I was concerned “www.the-mega-man-home-page.com” just wouldn’t do...)

Thus, www.mmhp.net it was.

- The MegaMaster