I am proposing to reserve all top-level underscore labels (_*) for special use.
Why?
My understanding of the problem is:
(1) There are several naming systems. Some of them can be enabled/disabled via nsswitch;
others are completely "disconnected" from OS resolution, but still use dotted
strings for naming.
(2) We want to avoid naming collisions with these other systems, so we designed
some part of the namespace for non-DNS use.
However:
(3) The DNS is a very common naming system, but not necessarily the primary
one. This is especially true from the perspective of someone (or some
application) primarily using another naming system.
In the light of (3), I wonder if the "alt" special use TLD really solves (1)
and (2). In particular, it should be noted that
- it only grants second-level domains to other namespace usage schemes;
- it calls non-DNS communities out to be using an "alternative" only (although
it may be their primary choice);
As a consequence of that,
- names will feel unnecessarily long and clumsy, from the perspective of the
other naming scheme's community;
- user communities of namespaces under "alt" may feel that their namespace is a
second-class citizen, due to the presence of the suffix, the meaning of the suffix, and
the extra length;
... so it is doubtful to me whether non-DNS communities would really follow the
"alt" scheme, or just keep using top-level names. I think this is likely to
happen.
On the other hand, it seems that
- the root likely doesn't need underscore names (because the root domain does
not run an application which would need something like _443._tcp.);
- _foo instead of foo.alt feels more "genuine" (it actually is at the top
level), and is much shorter;
- it eliminates the need to choose a specific "word" to use as the special-use
TLD, so it is meaning-agnostic and language-agnostic;
- prefix characters are common in other cases already (@username, #hashtag), so
_service may become natural.
Curious to hear what the WG thinks.
Best,
Peter
On 6/14/22 09:51, internet-dra...@ietf.org wrote:
A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
This draft is a work item of the Domain Name System Operations WG of the IETF.
Title : The ALT Special Use Top Level Domain
Author : Warren Kumari
Filename : draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-15.txt
Pages : 11
Date : 2022-06-14
Abstract:
This document reserves a string (ALT) to be used as a TLD label in
non-DNS contexts. It also provides advice and guidance to developers
developing alternative namespaces.
[Ed note: Text inside square brackets ([]) is additional background
information, answers to frequently asked questions, general musings,
etc. They will be removed before publication. This document is
being collaborated on in Github at: https://github.com/wkumari/draft-
wkumari-dnsop-alt-tld. The most recent version of the document, open
issues, etc should all be available here. The authors (gratefully)
accept pull requests. ]
The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld/
There is also an htmlized version available at:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-15
A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-ietf-dnsop-alt-tld-15
Internet-Drafts are also available by rsync at rsync.ietf.org::internet-drafts
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