Re: [DNSOP] Last Call: <draft-ietf-dnsop-onion-tld-00.txt> (The .onion Special-Use Domain Name) to Proposed Standard

[Edward Lewis <[e-mail]>]

On 8/7/15, 10:29, "DNSOP on behalf of Wendy Seltzer"
<[e-mail] on behalf of [e-mail]> wrote:

>You might find https://spec.torproject.org/ helpful as a listing of
>various tor specs and design documents, if you prefer that to a git
>repository.

That's the site I've been using.


>
>While Tor has not necessarily used IETF conventions, the project has
>long been committed to public documentation of its design and protocol
>choices. Tor distinguishes between "proposals," not yet implemented, and
>specs.[1]

It's fine to "not use IETF conventions".  (One of my ratholes is that I
find researching IETF documents rather frustrating - just to underscore I
am not saying Tor's documentation is deficient compared to IETF standards.)

Still, the documents I have access to do not give me a deep enough sense
of, well, why the names are different from DNS domain names.  I presume
they are from the email discussion, but what I am reading in the documents
- and I stress "reading in the documents" meaning that might be the gap -
doesn't give me enough background.

As far as stability of the documents, referring to a document by URL only
(which is accepted in IETF documents at times) isn't generally accepted.
I admit this is a bit of a red herring point, because this can be changed,
but if there were other means to refer to the document in a reference
citation, it would help.

E.g., randomly typing a four digit RFC number:

http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7392.txt

vs.

Dutta, P., Bocci, M., and L. Martini, "Explicit Path Routing for Dynamic
Multi-Segment Pseudowires", RFC 7392, DOI 10.17487/RFC7392, December 2014,
<http://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc7392>.


That is, full title, RFC document identity, date and authors/editors (not
in that order).

PS - I don't mean to harp on this.  I'd hoped to have someone send me
links to other documents because I want to learn more about the names in
".onion" and other identifiers in Tor.