On 11/23/2010 17:35, Joe Abley wrote:

On 2010-11-23, at 20:26, Doug Barton wrote:

On 11/23/2010 16:19, Joe Abley wrote:

1. there is no restriction to be inferred from RFC 1123 that TLD
labels be alphabetic;

Unqualified "yes" to this.

I presume you appreciate that not everybody shares your opinion on
this.

Hence the word "incorrectly" in the diff I supplied.

It's also probably worth pointing out that I have been diligently trying to avoid the even-more-painful rathole of attempting to forensically determine the true meaning and intent behind the words. That said I have fairly strong suspicions with pretty good foundations that I understand why it was written the way it was, and I _still_ don't agree that the document, as written, defines a protocol restriction.

One could also travel down the more-painful-still rathole of things like 'confirmation bias' that motivate people to see "evidence" of what they have always believed to be true even when it isn't there, but I'm pretty sure we don't want to go there.

2. it is better for deployed software to break than for the IETF
to involve itself in anything resembling policy.

A qualified "yes" here. I'm saying that in _this_ situation, the
IETF does not and should not have a policy role, and should limit
its commentary to the technical. There is (rather obviously at this
point) no _technical_ reason that TLD labels should be
all-alphabetic.

Well, beyond the expectation in deployed software this should be the
case. That's an operational consideration that I think is reasonable
to describe as technical.

... which is why I'm willing to compromise as far as including a "Here be dragons" in your draft. But you could reductio this argument all the way down to not doing IDN TLDs at all, and solve the whole problem. For that matter, >3 character TLDs were clearly a mistake. Do you want to tell Cary that his delegation has been revoked, or should I?

The "deployed software will break" argument can be used as a reason not to do anything you choose to apply it to, especially in DNS. But whether it's worth it or not is a policy question. I'll say it one (hopefully) last time. There is no _technical_ reason why TLD strings cannot include digits, and the IETF should not say that there is.

Furthermore I am saying that the benefits of keeping the TLD
namespace open to all technically possible values outweigh the
costs. [...]

I thought you weren't interested in discussing policy in the IETF?
:-)


Doug (... and I'd have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!)

--

        Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
                        -- OK Go

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