Namecoin has never worked because necessity to install browser plugins
(or do other things like setting special DNS servers) ruined its brilliant idea at the very beginning. I would like to announce a feature of
Nxt that offers a solution to the problem.
The workflow is quite simple1] You send a transaction that states "ThisDomainName = ThisAddress"
2] If you want to change the address then just send one more transaction
The domain name can be any string of Unicode chars. The address can be anything like "173.194.112.174", or "2001:0db8:11a3:09d7:1f34:8a2e:07a0:765d", or "mydomain.com/secretpage.php?parameter=value", or "
[email protected]", or "tel:+44-20-8123-4567", or even "
bitcoin:1BTCorgHwCg6u2YSAWKgS17qUad6kHmtQW".
There are 2 main ways to use Nxt DNS without third-party plugins.
1]
Server-side. A web server analyses Nxt blockchain and replaces nxt-links with corresponding addresses before sending HTML documents to users.
2]
Client-side. A web browser runs a JS script that connects to Nxt bootstrapping nodes and replaces nxt-links. This way requires to embed a small script and run it on "onload" event. The script will do all the work via CORS, JSONP or other techniques.
As a side effect Nxt does not allow to transfer ownership of a domain to other accounts, so cybersquatting is not a problem.
Nxt will be released on the 3rd of January, 2014. That day will be a day when we make one more step to truly decentralized Internet.