On Mon, Jun 09, 2008 at 04:53:42PM +0100, Gervase Markham wrote: > > What you're really > > trying to do here is extract meaning from the domain name, but you > > can't do that reliably. Previous efforts in that direction have > > failed in unexpected ways; and given that you seem to have multiple > > ways you want to use this feature, I don't see any reason to believe > > you won't have surprising failures too. > > I think your statements of doom need to be more specific.
I think you may be misplacing the burden of proof there. We have previous cases where apparently innocent inference of this sort of metadata about domains turned out to be harmful. I'm arguing, by way of analogy, that it is not unreasonable to suppose your approach may cause harm too. Your response appears to be that you won't cause that kind of harm. I'm sure that's true. But my argument is that, because you are relying on meanings that simply aren't in the DNS at all, your feature is automatically fragile. It will behave in ways that are surprising, because the behaviour of cookies (and, for that matter, of grouping of history stuff) will be based on hard-coded bits inaccessible to any user unwilling to read the source code. Also, new operators of various domains that may want to behave differently than your current expectation will be disadvantaged by what you're doing. Without getting every current user in the world to upgrade their client, they will continue to suffer that disadvantage to some extent. That seems like a kind of "harm" to me, but I appreciate that we may have different meanings of that word. Best regards, A -- Andrew Sullivan [EMAIL PROTECTED] +1 503 667 4564 x104 http://www.commandprompt.com/ _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
