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

[Eliot Lear <[e-mail]>]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the explanation.  Please see below.

On 7/17/15 4:38 PM, Richard Barnes wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2015 at 4:20 PM, Eliot Lear <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> I have no particular objection to the concept here, but I do have a
>> question about one sentence in the draft.  Section 1 states:
>>>    Like Top-Level Domain Names, .onion addresses can have an arbitrary
>>>    number of subdomain components.  This information is not meaningful
>>>    to the Tor protocol, but can be used in application protocols like
>>>    HTTP [RFC7230].
>>>
>> I honestly don't understand what is being stated here, or why a claim is
>> made about HTTP at all in this document.  Are we talking about the
>> common practice of www.example.com == example.com?  And what
>> significance does that last phrase have to the document?
> I made a comment on this to the authors earlier, and they decided to
> leave it as-is :)
>
> The idea is that TOR routing will only use the first label after
> .onion, but if you're using the .onion name in an application, that
> application might use the whole name.  For example, if you put
> "http://mail.example.onion/", TOR will route on "example.onion", but
> the HTTP Host header might be "mail.example.onion".
>
> -

I just leave the IESG and WG with the comment that two of us "old
timers" are trying to divine the meaning of those two sentences, and
that can't be good for others with (even) less clue.  Personally I think
the easiest approach is to remove those two sentences, but if others
really disagree, then a bit more clarity seems in order.

Eliot