Re: [DNSOP] draft-liman-tld-names-04

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 11:15:04PM +1100,
 Mark Andrews <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 41 lines which said:

> > So, there is no ambiguity: 192.0.2.4 is always an IP address, even if
> > ICANN delegates ".4".
> 
> Except there are plenty of applications that don't do this so it is 
> a real problem.

I do not really see what conclusion you draw from that fact. Yes,
there are broken applications, I do not doubt it. There are probably
apps that try to resolve a domain name without checking before that it
is not an IP address, hereby violating RFC 1123. These apps will have
problems if ICANN delegates .NNN where NNN is a number.

But it does not imply that we should hardwire the no-digits rule in
a RFC. For two reasons:

1) There are applications that violate RFC 5322 (typically email
syntax checkers on Web pages, which reject many valid RFC 5322
addresses). Yet, we do not modify RFC 5322 to align it on these apps. 

2) It may be a wise policy for ICANN to refuse the delegation of
all-digits TLDs. But it is a policy issue, similar to registries (most
TLD do so) which delegates only LDH domains (when the DNS would accept
other names). There is zero technical reason to write down this limit
in a RFC about the syntax.