[DNSOP] Comments on draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-05

[Federico Santandrea <[e-mail]>]

All,

I have read, and I support this draft in its current form.

I propose these two additions to it:

1)  applications may query for "alt." for some RR. If the
    resolver is not "alt-tld aware", or alt-tld functionality
    has been disabled, then the request will return NXDOMAIN;
    if instead the mechanism is supported, it would return
    NOERROR with an empty answer. Note that this is backwards
    compatible with non-alt-aware implementations since they
    would leak in DNS and NXDOMAIN will be returned by some
    other server.

2a) applications may also query for "<something>.alt" in the
    same way as above, to determine whether an handler for
    that particular namespace is available or not.

-- or alternatively --

2b) as above, but it might be specified that the query is
     to be done on a TXT RR specifically and that, instead
     of the empty answer, a record might be returned with
     contents that can be used to in some way ascertain that
     the handler is actually for the implementation we expect
     it to be (for example a software name or version, or
     protocol "UUID"?)

This allows applications to determine both if the alt mechanism
is generally supported and if the particular namespace is
supported (for example, to choose between showing instructions
suggestions to download a plugin and to upgrade the underlying
software platform). Also it avoids everyone choosing "magic"
values to check whether handlers for their namespace have
been installed or not.

Just a rough idea... of course if you find it useful I would
I would need to fix it in form and language.

Let me know what you think about this.

-- 
Federico