The top-level domain (TLD) is the last section of a domain name, and it is often the most recognizable part of a web address. Common TLDs include “.com,” “.net,” “.org,” among others. Serving as the highest level in the Domain Name System (DNS) structure of the Internet, the TLD represents the type or geographical location of the website it is associated with.
The TLD you’re specifically asking about, XN—NODE, is actually not a recognized TLD. You may be misunderstanding the format of Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet “a-z”. They were introduced due to a demand for domain names in non-Roman letter based languages, like Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic and other scripts.
An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. To make these even more friendly for internet users worldwide, the domain names are represented as words in the native language.
However, DNS, which is essentially the address book of the Internet, only understands ASCII characters. This is where Punycode comes into the picture. Punycode is a encoding syntax by which a string of Unicode characters is transformed into a shorter, ASCII-only string.
When the IDN is registered, the registrar uses Punycode to convert the Unicode characters into a string that starts with “xn—”, followed by the ASCII equivalent of the Unicode string. This is what DNS understands. So, “xn—” is actually just the identifier that the subsequent characters are encoded Punycode for non-ASCII characters in an international domain name.
For instance, the IDN “Bücher.com”, when encoded in Punycode, becomes “xn—bcher-kva.com”.
Therefore, “XN—NODE” likely represents a partly encoded Punycode string, but it’s incomplete. It’s important to understand, however, that “XN—NODE” is not in the accepted format for a top-level domain, so it would not function as one.
To wrap up, the top-level domain is a significant component of a web address. However, “XN—NODE”, in itself, is not an officially recognized top-level domain. It is however likely part of an encoded Punycode string representing non-ASCII characters in an international domain name.
Sources:
1. “Internationalized domain name.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name
2. “Punycode.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
3. “Top-level domain.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-level\_domain
4. “Understand domain names.” The United States Patent and Trademark Office, https://www.uspto.gov/trademark/additional-guidance-and-resources/understand-domain-names.
5. ICANN, https://www.icann.org/.
