Re: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-6man-rfc6874bis-00.txt

[Philip Homburg <[e-mail]>]

>> Instead of doing this, maybe we should pick a new character in an update of
>> RFC 4007 and deprecate '%' as a mistake?
>
>Even 9 years ago the WG concluded that '%' was too engrained in code and
>actual practice to deprecate it. Many libraries that handle IPv6 addresses
>support '%' and that means that innumerable pieces of software would be
>impacted, so deprecation seems impractical.
>
>If this was a mistake, it was made in 2005 when we approved RFC4007.

If we started changing 9 years ago, we would be done now. What I see is
that addresses with zone IDs are used rarely and locally. And lots of software
doen't even know how to deal with it. 

If we now introduce, for example, '-' in addition to '%' and require parsers
to accept both, but canonical output remains at '%' for a while then we
will have a sensible input format for URLs.

Keeping '%' as the only option means that URLs will remain a mess.

>> Aternatively, if we make fe80::ABCD%0 a valid address in the socket API
>
>I think you'll find that it already is. I use the netifaces module in Python
>and it returns things like [{'addr': '00:ff:19:f7:7d:9a'}], 23: [{'addr': 'fe8
>0::216a:f0d3:2303:3d1%6', 'netmask': 'ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff::/64', 'broadcast': 
>'fe80::ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff%6'}]. It's a bit obscure, though. Also (before
>Python 3.7) socket.getaddrinfo(socket.gethostname(),0) on Windows would
>return fe80::216a:f0d3:2303:3d1%6, but somebody changed that behaviour.

I guess I was too terse.

>From a socket API point of view writing an IPv6 address without zone ID is
equivalent to using zone ID 0. So 2001:db8::1 and 2001:db8::1%0 are the
same. 

However, in the case of link local, the opengroup specifically disallows
the use of zone ID 0.

If we would introduce a command like
'set-default-interface-for-link-local eth0'
that makes zone ID 0 available, then a URL like http://[fe80::abcd]/
could work. No change needed to browsers, no complex syntax.