[Inip-discuss] some comments on draft-lewis-domain-names-03
Suzanne Woolf <suzworldwide@gmail.com> Mon, 04 July 2016 20:34 UTC
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From: Suzanne Woolf <suzworldwide@gmail.com>
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Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2016 16:36:20 -0400
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Subject: [Inip-discuss] some comments on draft-lewis-domain-names-03
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Hi, Gearing up to take related issues in Berlin….as we discussed in the ARCING BOF in Buenos Aires, it still seems the topic of "domain names" and related identifiers deserves to be considered in a larger context than the DNS, and this draft is a strong step in that direction. So I'm commenting here in hopes of encouraging others to do the same and encouraging Ed to keep working on it. Suzanne ============== Some notes on draft-lewis-domain-names-03.txt: Suzanne Woolf July 4, 2016 These occur as I read through the document, so in linear order, if not necessarily orderly. I've tried to include enough context that the reader can tell what I'm responding to. On "NOTE TO RFC EDITOR AND REVIEWERS" * Not sure this belongs on DNSOP; ARCING or INIP-DISCUSS. I'm sending my comments to INIP-DISCUSS because I'd like to see the IAB adopt this draft. Sec. 1.1: * Not sure I'd describe the relationship between RFC 2860 and RFC 6761 as a "conflict." For example, some people believe there's no conflict if we define the difference between "names in the DNS root zone" (or "DNS names" as a subset of "domain names") and "domain names". * "The beneficiaries of such work include both the developers of software that makes use of names and identifiers." Only one of the "both" is specified. Other possible parties who are interested include users and protocol developers, so maybe the "both" covers more than two :-) Sec. 1.2: * It seems to me that the document also includes some considerations for how the clarification can be done; you mention backwards compatibility, but I think "interoperability" more broadly is even more useful. Sec. 2: * "rational" seems like a typo for "rationale". * "Prior to this, domain referred to principally an administrative domain, such as the initial organizations involved in networks at the time." Conceptually, this is probably where the idea comes from that there's necessarily some connection between a domain name and a human-accessible "meaning" in addition to a "value" that can be reliably looked up and compared by machines. * "Noticeably absent is a terminating dot or any mention or representation of a root." To me, the mention of a tree does seem to imply a root, though, as a matter of definition of the type of graph we're talking about....yes? Sec. 3.1: * "The DNS protocol place size restrictions..." should be "places" * "The DNS creates the notion that names are assigned by an authority per zone." Doesn't it also create the notion of "zone" as distinct from "domain" also? or is the distinction referred to earlier? It doesn't seem to me that it would be meaningful without the notion of explicitly hierarchical delegation of authority, which we didn't have in the hosts.txt file-- we needed the DNS protocol for recognizing the distribution of authority in the traversal of the tree and the resolution of names. * "In sum, the treatment of ASCII (and only ASCII) cases as equivalent is a distortion of the Domain Name hierarchy." Two comments on this paragraph: did we previously describe the Domain Name space explicitly as hierarchical, or as a (graph theoretic) tree? I think this point is important, but it makes sense to establish the underlying property before noting the violation of it. And it took me a couple of times through this sentence before realizing "cases" meant "upper/lower" and not examples or items in a list, so it might read better as "...ASCII (and only ASCII) upper and lower cases..." I think this is important because trying to duplicate the decisions about DNS names and case with respect to other domain names and other properties has led a lot of people astray over a long time-- it's an analogy that keeps being made even though it's almost always a bad one. Clarity that it's a specific exception to a fundamental property of the namespace could be helpful. * I find myself suspecting there's a meaningful distinction to be made between protocols that "interact" with DNS and protocols that actually "interoperate" with it. :-) Sec. 3.2: * If you change "specifically" to "explicitly" in the previous sentence, "The reference is explicit." at the end of paragraph 2 is redundant. Sec. 3.3: * The description "....a way for client software to know how to resolve a name, that is, convert a name into a network address." seems like a pretty limited assumption about what happens in name resolution, even in URIs. Maybe "....convert a name into its intended value" is more generic? Sec. 3.6: * Does it make sense to say a few more words about what constitutes "undesirable outcomes"? Is IDNA the first appearance of such a convention with any dependence or basis on human factors issues such as "confusability" or identification of "variant"? There's a notion with Unicode and IDNA of ambiguous or indeterminate transformation/normalization that makes comparison unreliable in some situations, and identifiers based on some codepoints potentially unstable. But RFC 4290 seems to go considerably further in establishing the idea that some constraints about formation and delegation of valid strings in the DNS namespace should depend on human ability to evaluate them, not only whether they can be unambiguously compared and manipulated by code. Sec. 3.7: * Is it worth noting that the resolution protocol for Tor names is also different to DNS, and that querying the global DNS for a ".onion" name is, within the Tor protocol, something that's not supposed to happen? i.e. it's intrinsically an error to query the DNS for such names at all. Sec. 3.9: * Reference to what's punycode alongside the pointer to the explanation of why it's not used in mDNS? Sec. 5: * Not sure why Lyman's candidate definition was removed; as a way of tying the whole discussion together into a generally usable whole, I thought it was useful. Since there's no thought of making this document normative, I would think it could provide, at worst, a useful guideline to protocol and software developers. Or do too many protocols use "domain names" that don't follow Lyman's definition?
- [Inip-discuss] some comments on draft-lewis-domai… Suzanne Woolf