On Monday 07 August 2006 16:09, Tony Finch wrote: > On Mon, 7 Aug 2006, Hamish Marson wrote: > > The RFC's actually state that a domain MUST start with a letter, and > > be any letter or digit or hyphen after. So according to the RFC's > > purely numberic domains are illegal. > > No! Wrong! Totally wrong! If they were illegal they would never have been > allocated. Duh. >
Yeah, Right... And Verisign never wildcarded domains either did they? Duh! right back at you. > RFC 1123 section 2.1: > > The syntax of a legal Internet host name was specified in RFC-952 Hostname vs DomainName RFC1035 is still current. never superceeded. It states Domain names. RFC1123 says hostnames... In fact RFC1035 isn't even marked as updated! (At least the copies I'm looking at now) AFAICS RFC1123 only mentions hostnames, nothing about domains. A small semantic difference I know, but possibly an important one. I wonder what Cricket has to say about domain names being all digits? Possibly it comes under the be lenient in what you accept & rigid in what you present rule. RFC1912 throws more wood on the fire... **************************** Allowable characters in a label for a host name are only ASCII letters, digits, and the `-' character. Labels may not be all numbers, but may have a leading digit (e.g., 3com.com). Labels must end and begin only with a letter or digit. See [RFC 1035] and [RFC 1123]. (Labels were initially restricted in [RFC 1035] to start with a letter, and some older hosts still reportedly have problems with the relaxation in [RFC 1123].) Note there are some Internet hostnames which violate this rule (411.org, 1776.com). The presence of underscores in a label is allowed in [RFC 1033], except [RFC 1033] is informational only and was not defining a standard. There is at least one popular TCP/IP implementation which currently refuses to talk to hosts named with underscores in them. It must be noted that the language in [1035] is such that these rules are voluntary -- they are there for those who wish to minimize problems. Note that the rules for Internet host names also apply to hosts and addresses used in SMTP (See RFC 821). **************************** So even rfc1912 still thinks all digit domains are incorrect... But it interprets 1123 as meaning hosts & domains. But even in 1996 it was recognised that the registrars didn't really follow the RFC's properly... I still think all digit domains are probably worth a point or so. > [DNS:4]. One aspect of host name syntax is hereby changed: the > restriction on the first character is relaxed to allow either a > letter or a digit. Host software MUST support this more liberal > syntax. > > Tony.
pgpx2IGc4ElMm.pgp
Description: PGP signature
