Re: [DNSOP] Some thoughts on special-use names, from an application standpoint

[David Conrad <[e-mail]>]

Mark,

> What is the actual harm, discounting aesthetics?

For one thing, names not supported by the underlying infrastructure will _always_ leak.

In the bad old days, when an application got a string ending in .UUCP, .BITNET, .CSNET, etc., it had to know that those strings had to be treated differently. Various hacked libraries did different things to deal with those endings, and usually imperfectly. Worse, the universe of endings was local policy specific but the use of those names was global in scope, so there were a never ending series of issues where a string would work in one locale but not in another, resulting in user complaints, general confusion, and much gnashing of teeth. After a number of years, we (re)learned that maybe using the name of something to distinguish its underlying infrastructure requirements wasn't the best idea.

.LOCAL, .ONION, and 6761 in general allow us to repeat history yet again, since we seemed doomed to be unable to remember earlier lessons.

Regards,
-drc