Re: [DNSOP] I-D Action: draft-ietf-dnsop-sutld-ps-04.txt

[Andrew McConachie <[e-mail]>]

On 5/15/17 10:57, [e-mail] wrote:
> A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
> This draft is a work item of the Domain Name System Operations of the IETF.
>
>          Title           : Special-Use Domain Names Problem Statement
>          Authors         : Ted Lemon
>                            Ralph Droms
>                            Warren Kumari
> 	Filename        : draft-ietf-dnsop-sutld-ps-04.txt
> 	Pages           : 27
> 	Date            : 2017-05-15
>
> Abstract:
>     The Special-Use Domain Names IANA registry policy defined in RFC 6761
>     has been shown through experience to present unanticipated
>     challenges.  This memo presents a list, intended to be comprehensive,
>     of the problems that have been identified.  In addition it reviews
>     the history of Domain Names and summarizes current IETF publications
>     and some publications from other organizations relating to Special-
>     Use Domain Names.
>
>
The use of the term 'meaning' in this document is problematic. Meaning 
is something that humans do, not machines. What I believe we're actually 
interested in is scoping and binding. How a name is scoped and what 
object it gets bound to, not what it means.

For example the text:
"Domain Names with unambiguous global meaning are preferable to
  Domain Names with local meaning which will be ambiguous.
  Nevertheless both globally-meaningful and locally-special names
  are in use and must be supported."

Should probably be changed to:
"Domain Names with unambiguous global bindings are preferable to
  Domain Names with local bindings which will be ambiguous.
  Nevertheless both globally-scoped and locally-scoped names
  are in use and must be supported."

This is more akin to how programming language designers discuss this 
subject.[1] I don't want to delve into the usage of 'meaning' in RFC 
2826 itself, but there are a couple other uses of 'meaning' in this I-D 
that I believe should be removed, and I am happy to send text if people 
agree.

I'm also worried that some readers of this document might interpret its 
use of 'global' or 'local' in a geographic sense, and not a scoping 
sense. But I don't know how to deal with this. Perhaps it's just a risk.

Thank you for all your hard work on this,
Andrew

[1] https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0227/