2.10 Foreign sites

There are many good non-UK sites. However there are a number of problems with the information they contain:

• different health systems and cultural practices;



• use of different terminology;



• recommending different treatments;



• different availability of treatments and drugs.

It is not always obvious that a Web site is not in the UK, or that you could be e-mailing someone abroad.

You can usually tell what type of organisation has produced the site, and in which country, by looking at the first part of the Web address (the domain name) between http:// and the first /, for example:

• http://www.cafamily.org.uk/
• http://omni.ac.uk/

This 'domain name' is the unique name which identifies that organisation on the Internet. The codes at the end represent the type of organisation and its country of origin.

Common organisational codes include:

• .com (for commercial organisations);
• .edu (for educational organisations);
• .gov (for governments);
• .org (for organisations, usually non-commercial)

Country codes, for example:

• no code (for the USA);
• .au (for Australia);
• .int (for international);
• .uk (for the UK).

Second level codes, for example:

• .ac.uk (for educational organisations in the UK);
• .co.uk (for commercial organisations in the UK);
• .org.uk (for non-commercial organisation in the UK).
  

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© Copyright for this site is held by Contact a Family and the Information Society Research and Consultancy Group, School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Site published February 2003. Last updated October 2006. Review date October 2007.