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

[Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 12:44:48PM -0500, Ted Lemon wrote:
> 
> If special-use names are at the top, then you can just look at the terminal label to see that you need to use a different protocol to resolve names under the special-use name.  If special-use names are not at the top, then you have to have special code that grovels through the labels doing pattern matches. 

This is a bizarre argument.  Once you're using DNS names, you need code that handles names label by label anyway (and copes with all the brain-death from the search path and the difference between FQDN-in-URI vs. FQDN-in-DNS and all that).  So you're going to have to cope with the label-by-label rules, and at that point I find it hard to believe that the number of labels makes a really big difference to complexity.  

If your argument is instead that implementers are just going to pop off the last label and look at it, well, then they need some namespace other than the DNS anyway, because that's not how the DNS works.  Assuming that you can just pop the right-most label off some putative domain name and assess that without going through all the DNS matching rules, in fact, strikes me as dangerous.  And once you've shifted into .arpa. space, at least you know you're supposed to be dealing with infrastructure.

Also, partly echoing what Joe argued, the .local case is special because (1) Apple implemented and released it first and then documented; (2) the original plan was to treat those names as part of the same port-53 protocol with locally-scoped semantics; (3) then the plan became to run a perfectly parallel namespace for another protocol; and (4) in any case, the idea was to hide from the user that the names were in some way different.  (We can see the nasty side effects of 2-4 in the current discussions in DNSSD, by the way.)  It does not appear in this case, at least as near as I can tell from my admittedly less-than-careful read so far, that the plan is to be quite so similar to DNS, so I'm actually not sure that what's needed here is the DNS at all.  I'm in fact reminded of a widely-worn t-shirt[1].

I think this conversation is useful, but I really think it's premature to be talking about TLDs.

[1] http://www.cafepress.com/nxdomain.624728706

Best,

A

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Andrew Sullivan
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