On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, [ISO-8859-1] Mathias KЖrber wrote:
> > If we take a step back, we could say that the whole Verisign incident > > demonstrated pretty clearly that the fundamental DNS premise of having no > > more than one root in the namespace is seriously wrong. This is the > > fallacy of "universal classification" so convincingly trashed by > > J.L.Borges in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". Sigle-root > > classifications simply do not work in real-world contexts. > ... for objects which are created outside said classification and need > to/ want to/should be classified in it. However, the DNS does not > pretend to classify anything existing outside it in the real-world but > implements a namespace with the stated goal of providing unique > identification (which still requires a single-root) Technically, DNS encodes the authority delegation, _and_ tries to attach human-readable labels to every entity accessible by the Internet. If the goal were unique identification, MAC addresses would do just fine. No need for DNS. The whole snake nest of issues about DNS revolves around the fact that the labels themselves carry semantic load. Semantic-free labels do not generate trademark, fair-use, squatting, etc controversies - and there's quite a lot of those around us. The issue with authority delegation is not clear-cut, too, for it raises the important questions "who's the authority?" and "how authority is selected?". This is pretty much the question most wars were fought about. > So this argument is bogus IMHO... I would say you should consider it more carefully. As is, we have an artificially contentuous structure, which cannot be fixed. There are known better methods of converting semantically loaded labels into pointers to the entities, which do not suffer from the artificially imposed limitation of seeing everyting as a strict hierarchy. Most Internet users are well-versed in use of those methods. So the question here is merely engineering, and convincing people to switch over. _Users_ have already voted with their patterns of use... how often do you see them actually typing domain names in? Address books, bookmarks, "my favorites", "Reply-To:" etc are used in most cases, as is Yahoo or Google. Your statements, in effect, confirm my position that most people do not even recognize semantic value of the domain names, considering them mere unique IDs. In other words - there are much better search engines than DNS. Remove it from the critical path, and the whole Verisign, ICANN, etc issue will go away, with little practical change in the end-user experience. --vadim
