Subject: Re: [iucg] draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi

From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 15:41:30 +0100

At 02:38 08/03/2009, Lyman Chapin wrote:
>John,
>If you type "http://320.170.98.32" into an old version of Internet
>Explorer (if I remember correctly, Windows 95 vintage), you'll get to
>the main IETF web page as surely as if you had typed "http://
>64.170.98.32" (or "http://www.ietf.org" for that matter). This is
>just an artifact of the way in which software interfaces interpret
>what users enter, not an observation about the DNS or the encoding of
>data fields -

Must the retrocompatibility be with the RFCs, with the old IE 
practices or with the diversity of the users' expectations.
that is the question.

My answer is "with the users expectations", what calls for the 
support of diversity.
That is a true paradigmatic change.
But I do not think it necessarilly calls for a basic technology 
change. i.e. no STD but BCP changes.

jfc

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From: JFC Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 19:05:27 +0100

Thank you for this clear and refreshing KISS wording.This certainly reflects
the common lead user understanding.
jfc
2009/3/9 Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>

> My personal view is that broken code that isn't a defacto specification
> of the DNS, or broken specifications of things other than the DNS, need
> to go find their authors and get fixed, and not become dejure nuances of
> the "corrected" specifications of the DNS. In particular, it is
> reasonable for any zone admin, the IANA included, to make a
> registry-local rule reflecting momentary annoyance at the existence of
> well-known bugs, but that no such "rule" should be internalized to the
> DNS specs, with a vastly longer shelf-life than the random DNS
> (mis)using application.
>
> Yes, there is a bug (actually, a shared bug with multiple, possibly
> independent interoperable implementations of obvious brokenness), but
> 666 is no different from AAA, and a five label sequence composed of
> numeric (or octal or hex) character values is safe as houses (if ugly),
> and it is possible to constrain allocation of label sequences so that
> label sequences terminating in numeric (or octal or hex) character
> values, and having fewer than five labels, are also not incorrectly
> interpreted by this bug-set as dotted quads.
> Eric