The biggest redesign in decades: example.com now speaks six languages

The example.com domain is reserved by IANA for documentation purposes and has served as a sample URL for developers and writers since the late nineties. The wording on the page has stayed largely the same over the years, but its appearance has been through several major overhauls. DebugBear dissected the latest one and reconstructed the full timeline.

What changed on 28 September 2026

Until that day example.com was a static English-language page. The redesign added multi-language support via JavaScript: the content cycles every five seconds through English, Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. The same script also injects an SVG book icon.

The language switch isn't a blunt text swap but a gradual opacity transition. Each character is wrapped in its own span, and every following span gets a slightly larger animation delay than the one before it, so the letters fade in one after another.

Why it was done

IANA explained the reasoning. The main concern is bandwidth: the page is heavily trafficked, so it was split into a basic page plus a separate JavaScript file carrying the extra content. Since most of the traffic is automated and tends not to fetch the script, overall data requirements drop.

The organisation also reminds everyone that the domain is meant for illustrative examples in documentation, not for availability testing. People sometimes copy a sample config and forget to replace the example domain in it, which accounts for some incidental traffic. But there is no requirement for an HTTP service to be present on the host at all — it's run purely as a courtesy.

Twenty years of small tweaks

The site launched on 1 January 1999; the earliest Wayback Machine snapshot dates from 20 January 2002 and was simply a list of reserved domains in a table layout running on Apache. The familiar wording appeared 67 days later, and in 2003 a link to RFC 2606 was added.

The page then sat unchanged for seven years. In 2013 came the biggest redesign: a rounded card, an 'Example Domain' heading, and a move to the EdgeCast CDN instead of Apache. In 2019 the font stack was modernised and the copy lightly reworded.

After that the infrastructure churned faster: in 2025 the Server header vanished (EdgeCast had by then become Edgio and gone bankrupt), the HTML was minified, in December 2025 the site moved to Cloudflare, and in June 2026 an empty favicon was added to stop browsers hitting /favicon.ico.

DebugBear underlines one takeaway the page itself now states outright: don't rely on example.com as a service for testing and monitoring — the server doesn't always respond correctly. For that, infrastructure you control yourself is more dependable.

Source: Hacker News