Re: Introducing draft-6man-addresspartnaming

[Karl Auer <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 22:07 +0200, Richard Hartmann wrote:
> The second question on my mind is if using MUST for hextet is
> appropriate. Using SHOULD is fine as well though I personally think
> MUST is better to avoid any and all potential confusion.

"hextet" - oh dear. Were there really no better suggestions than quibble
and hextet? Sorry for missing the earlier discussions, an I'll pull my
head in if it's really gone that far down the track, but "hextet" is
wrong on o many levels. It implies that it consists of six things - like
a quintet (5), septet(7) or triplet(3). The idea that a hextet is four
hex digits is very counter-intuitive.

What about "quad"? IPv4 has "dotted quad", but I've never heard that
notation referred to as "quad" without the "dotted". I doubt there would
be confusion regardless, and certainly not in context. "Quad" accurately
conveys the sense of "four", there are four hex digits in each section
of an uncompressed IPv6 address etc - seems like a good word.

However, "field" is even better. It's straightforward and gets around
the fact that the chunk between two colons in an IPv6 address is often
*not* actually four hex digits. It may represent any number of hex
digits from zero to 32! For such a thing, "hextet"and "quad" are both
very wrong. "Field" would remain correct, however.

An invented word, unless it has the same quirky, geeky humor of "byte"
and "nibble", is most unlikely to be generally adopted.

Definitely "SHOULD", not "MUST". People will say what they say.
 
> this issue might not seem to be important at first, but many/most
> people tend to reconsider after some thinking,

I confess I thought at first you might be joking....

Regards, K.

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