Re: [DNSOP] [[e-mail]: I-D Action: draft-grothoff-iesg-special-use-p2p-names-00.txt]

[Warren Kumari <[e-mail]>]

On Dec 5, 2013, at 7:37 AM, Tim Wicinski <[e-mail]> wrote:

> 
> On 12/5/13 3:36 AM, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 02:40:36PM -0500,
>>  Warren Kumari <[e-mail]> wrote
>>  a message of 54 lines which said:
>> 
>>> I really like .alt -- it makes it clear that this is an alternate
>>> namespace type thing, mirrors the usenet alt convention, etc.  .p2p
>>> seems less descriptive, and not all alternate things are peer to
>>> peer.
>> I agree that .p2p is a bad idea. .not-dns is worse (because it is a
>> negative definition). For .alt, it is cute but I suspect that
>> convincing the Tor people to switch to onion.alt, or to convince Apple
>> to switch Bonjour to local.alt, will be some work...
>> 
>> 
> 
> I agree that while I think .alt makes sense to me, what makes sense to me is not what I expect upon others.
> At that point .pony or stephane's .lolcats would make as much sense to a similar percentage of people.

Sure -- I don't think that the string itself is important, but rather, in the words of Connor MacLeod: There can be only one!

This is not strictly true, but I think that it seems like a good general principle. If you are going to design something that looks like the DNS, but isn't (something that looks like an overlay / uses dot separated labels / "can be entered where you normally would enter an DNS name"), don't simply pick something for your right most label, instead pick something under .alt (or whatever we decide[0]).

Convincing all existing users (e.g .local) to move under the new labor (e.g local.alt) is probably a non-starter, but perhaps things like .bit, and new things may do so…
One of the things that we repeatedly heard during the "namespace collisions" debacle was that folk would like a "safe" place where they could put non-Interent DNS things. This seems related…

Things under .alt are not real delegations and are not guaranteed to be unique. There is no registry here (in the same way that .onion was not guaranteed to be unique

W

[0]: Luckily "naming things" discussions are never political or controversial, and so this should be an easy one :-P



> 
> I'd almost say we should name it .rfc#### which would not only be obvious to people who speak RFC, but would allow people to use their google machine to look up the RFC and learn something.
> 
> tim
> 

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