Re: [DNSOP] draft-wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld-04

[George Michaelson <[e-mail]>]

I had imagined, in that simpler time, that users never saw alt, but
imported other-name-space calls mapping into gethostbyname() acquired .alt
unless an override was present. Ie, it was a more formal label of inclusion
of a non-DNS namespace so the alt label was in-system, not visible in the
other namespace.

This is how I recall the mapping from the pre-USENET news systems like the
one Jacob Palme ran, on Dec-10s was intruded into usenet news: his stuff
had a qualified form which was legal in-system in usenet, but was acquiring
a magic label on entry from the Dec-10 world. Lots of sendmail.cf files did
transforms which added/removed/appended/re-ordered mail addys to get magic
tokens in and out.

-G

On Thu, Feb 12, 2015 at 10:49 PM, Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Feb 12, 2015, at 1:44 AM, George Michaelson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> > Technology wise, this is short, and simple and clear. Would we had this
> before .onion eventuated, and dare I say it even .local from another time
> and place. WIring a TLD to be used for alternate namespaces so that we can
> safely anchor non-DNS names into the DNS and avoid repetitious stupidity is
> a good plan.
>
> I think that if .alt had existed when .local was defined, nothing would
> have been different. From a UI perspective, using an extra label to
> identify that a particular domain is special-use is worse, because it's
> more typing, and doesn't really make sense--which makes more sense:
> "myhost.local" or "myhost.local.alt"?
>
> So I think this work is worth doing, because there are probably cases
> where .alt will do just fine, but I don't think it gets rid of the problem
> of top-level special-use domains.  The "SHOULD" recommendation in the
> document is the right level of applicability: "MUST" would be wrong, and I
> appreciate that the authors did not use it.
>
>