Re: Fix IPV6 literal notation?

[Karl Auer <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, 2020-12-26 at 19:42 -0500, Gyan Mishra wrote:
> I agree just on difficult to read and hard to parse.

Anything new is hard to start with and becomes easy with practice.

For a way to make it even easier, see RFC1924 (
ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc1924.txt)

> The  :: Os compression helps, however does add confusion

I generally make the same recommendations as RFC5952.

The other thing people get hung up on is that the term "leading zeroes"
does not mean ALL the zeroes. In most classes there is at least one
person who tries to turn ":3000:" into ":3:" (and in one memorable case
":3001:" into ":31:").

> Understanding that when an IPv6 prefix is written that the leading
> higher order hex 0s are the not displayed within the hex field which
> leads to confusion.

Can we blame IPv4 octal representation? There are no higher-order
zeroes shown in IPv4 octets either, and nobody gets confused.

A lot of people treat IP addresses as symbols without understanding
their underlying meaning. Making the link between the written addresses
and the underlying bits helps a lot.

128 bits are just plain harder to get your head around than 32. IPv6
addresses are not easily parsed by the unaided human; they are too big
to be encompassed at a glance, regardless of the notation.

Regards, K.


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Karl Auer ([e-mail])
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