On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 03:41:04PM +0200, JFC Morfin wrote:
At 11:22 29/07/2011, Nicholas Ostler wrote:
The DNS only have three parameters in a query: {owner, type, class}.
Incorrect. It also has the prefix and the TLD that can be used to support presentation elements.
What do you mean by "prefix" and "TLD"? I hope you're not trying to suggest that every DNS lookup is of the form [prefix].TLD. Certainly, that is false unless you have a very ideosyncratic interpretation of the DNS. Zone cuts in the DNS are there for the administrative convenience _of the DNS_, and are not in themselves any kind of information about administrative boundaries for policy. The misunderstanding of this distinction, for instance, is a primary reason that http cookies are subject to so many woeful security problems, and why we have ended up with preposterous mechanisms like publicsuffix.org. The reason policy is important and unusual at or near the root is not because those zones are somehow special, but because they mostly do delegation out to other operators, so innovations at those points in the tree are places that can affect a large number of other zones. Therefore,
I think it is time to introduce the concept of "zonale" definition file that document the parameters of a TLD relational space. For example, the .FRA zonale will document the sensitivity of .FRA domain names to majuscule.
if what you are suggesting is that it needs to be possible to track down certain policy rules about a zone by looking up the location of such a policy in the DNS, along with rules about what to do if a zone doesn't come with a policy, then I might agree (and indeed, I committed during IETF week to put out a draft along these lines). If you're suggesting instead that we use the mere fact of the fully qualified domain name's labels to entail different formatting conventions, then I predict widespread failure from such simple inferences. Best, A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com