[12479] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: About the creation of new 3-letter domain(s)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bob Smart)
Wed May 18 23:18:47 1994
To: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 18 May 1994 20:45:42 -0400."
<199405190045.AA23913@world.std.com>
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 12:59:10 +1000
From: Bob Smart <smart@mel.dit.csiro.au>
I like the idea of using phone numbers as one of the ways that
people can easily get a personal DNS entry.
> Ok, the minuses:
>
> 1. To be consistent with current DNS practice they need to be used in
> reverse order and some people might find that awkward (at first,
> whether we'd all get used to them soon enough is an open question.)
The DNS is the Internet's name space. Its right-to-left style is
often a nuisance, particularly as many writing conventions, such
as the decimal number system, are left-to-right. For example the
highest level component in a URL is the top level domain name and
it occurs right in the middle of the URL. This is not nice.
The solution is to introduce an alternative syntax for domain names
which is left-to-right. My suggestion would be to use "/" as a
separator for this syntax. So mel.dit.csiro.au could alternatively
be written "/au/csiro/dit/mel". My phone number based DNS entry
might be /pri/61/3/282/2625.
This is only syntax: the DNS protocols don't use "."s to separate
components. However the IETF would need to standardize this. The
X.500 people have only recently standardized the external format
for writing X.500 names. The original theory that the external
format for X.500 names could be left as a local matter was a
serious mistake.
What serious problems would introducing an alternative left-to-right
external representation of DNS names cause, other than the obvious
one that people who get used to the new format will sometimes
have to go back to use old software that doesn't understand the
new format? An obvious aspect of this is that the initial RFC
should say "User interfaces should allow this left-to-right method
of entering domain names but databases and information sources
should only return the right-to-left format. This rule will be
revised when access to software supporting the left-to-right
format is widespread." Protocols which use the "." format, like
RFC821/822, would only accept the current right-to-left format,
but the e-mail user agent could support either format.
Bob Smart
