Subdomain Repurposing

Every site puts its “contact” or “careers” or “help” page somewhere different. What if the verb went in the URL itself - the same verb on every site - and the address bar became a tiny command line?

Subdomain Repurposing turns the subdomain into an action. Type a verb followed by a domain, hit return, and the system looks the verb up in an action database, finds the right server, and performs the action. No more hunting through somebody else's menus.

contact.example.comopens example.com's contact form
careers.example.comopens example.com's jobs page
help.example.comopens example.com's support page
contact.example.com verb . domain Action database contact → /contact careers → /jobs help → /support example.com performs the action the same verb works on every site that adopts it
The address bar becomes a tiny command line: verb + domain takes you to the action.

Why bother?

Think about how you use the web. Most visits to a site are a hunt for one of a handful of pages - contact, help, jobs, login, pay - and every site hides them somewhere different, behind navigation you'll learn once and never use again. A small shared vocabulary of verbs fixes that. Type contact. in front of any domain and your muscle memory works everywhere.

It helps people who never see the menus, too. For screen reader and keyboard-only users, a predictable verb beats a menu tree that changes shape on every site. And a verb survives being said out loud: “help dot example dot com” is a URL you can actually speak. (Try dictating your average deep link to a voice assistant and see how far you get.)

How it works

The patent describes a method that takes a command split into an activity portion (the verb) and a domain portion (the site). The activity is looked up in an action database to determine the operation; the domain is used to identify the server; the operation is then carried out on that server. The action database is what makes the same verb portable: each site declares what its verbs map to.

Title
Subdomain Repurposing
Inventor
Nigel Hamilton
Priority
22 October 2021
Filed
12 October 2022 · PCT international application
Published
WO 2023/067301 A1 · 27 April 2023
Read it
patents.google.com / WO2023067301A1
PDF (full specification)

An action layer on top of the web

The interesting part isn't any single verb - it's the layer. The web we have is a layer of documents: pages you read. This adds a thin layer of actions: verbs any site can opt into, working the same way everywhere they appear. Sites publish their action databases the way they publish a sitemap, and browsers, voice assistants and AI agents can all build on the same primitive.

Anyone with a domain can adopt it without changing the rest of their site. I keep circling this idea from different angles - it's the same itch behind wh.ax: show people, and now their AI agents, what they can do on a site, not just what they can read. The address bar was the web's first command line. It's time it learned some verbs.

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