Re: [homenet] alternatives to .home

[Suzanne Woolf <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I’d like to gently suggest that if the long-running discussion on the topic of special use names in DNSOP has taught us anything, it’s that the behavior people would like to have from DNS resolvers, users, etc. for a name is of primary importance. The choices of name resolution protocol, format of a name in presentation and on the wire, and other characteristics of the context for resolution are more important than the specific string.

The discussion so far, and RFC 7788 AFAICT, assume that homenet is talking about names that are compatible with domain names. However, the discussion has not been clear about exactly what conditions are assumed around handling those names.

What defines a special use domain name is how it is *used*. Without details of how it’s to be used, it’s impossible to determine characteristics for suitable strings, such as “must be human-friendly” or “doesn’t matter if it’s known to collide with another set of names/resolution context cues” or “must result in a specific response when presented to DNS resolvers.”

The answers to the questions in RFC 6761, Section 5, are intended to constitute a description of how a proposed special use name is special in its use. Without answers to those questions, it’s simply not clear what’s special about the proposed names or what limits are appropriate to put on strings that might be reserved for that use.



Suzanne


> On Jun 17, 2016, at 3:52 PM, Michael Richardson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> 
> Ted Lemon <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
>> It's much better not to do this. I think that the model of hiding
>> ".local" is wrong for just this reason.
> 
> Please explain more. Is it that I should be able to copy and paste from the
> UI to my command line?  How is showing .local in the GUI important?