Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades
- ID
- 32164
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 06 Oct 2026, 6:55 AM
- Fetched
- 06 Oct 2026, 3:15 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://www.debugbear.com/blog/example-dot-com-redesign-history
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 5.0
- Created
- 06 Oct 2026, 3:15 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coders
What happened
On 28 September 2026, example.com—the IANA-reserved documentation domain—got a redesign that cycles its purpose message through English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish every 5 seconds via JavaScript, with character-by-character opacity transitions and an SVG book icon. IANA says it split the page into basic content plus a separate JS file so automated traffic that does not fetch JavaScript uses less bandwidth. The page still says it is not a service and should not be relied on for testing or monitoring.
Why it matters
If you use example.com in tests, uptime checks, scraping, or tutorials, IANA's own wording says not to rely on it as a service; the redesign's JS-driven content and bandwidth-splitting could change what automated clients see. The concrete takeaway is to replace example.com with a controlled endpoint in monitoring/tests, while using the split-HTML-plus-JS pattern as a reference if you serve bot-heavy docs pages. No Malaysia-specific impact.
Discussion angle
Worth debating whether example.com's split—minimal HTML plus JS for extra language content—is a good bandwidth-saving pattern for docs sites, or whether it undermines progressive enhancement and automated testing.