Trying to pull things back together

[John C Klensin]

Hi.

I've been trying to follow this thread until I had something
useful to say.  Yesterday's notes were an attempt to separate
off some issues that seemed separable.  For the rest, I may not
be there yet, but I want to try to draw things together a bit,
at least as I see them.

First of all, many of the comments that were inspired by
"tables-02" are, I believe, issues that should be addressed or
clarified in "issues".  I am working on a revision to that
document that will, I hope, make some of those positions,
requirements, and insights easier to understand.  

One of them, mentioned briefly in my recent notes to Gervase
and Debbie, is of particular importance: The language we have
traditionally used to talk about labels in the DNS tends to
cause a lot of confusion for people who don't have a good
understanding of the context.  Sometimes we even confuse
ourselves.  In common practice, DNS labels are mnemonics that
help people remember or identify a network resource of some
sort.  They may be based on a language, because that is how
people think, but there is no inherent requirement for
orthographic consistency with how words in that that language
are formed or written.  I suggest that, in many if not all
cases, the rules people use for forming mnemonics they find
useful are rather more in the province of psychology than that
of linguistics.

For that reason, and for the reasons of scope that I hope my
note to Debbie explained, I suggest we drop specific issues of
language, linguistics, and orthography from this thread.  No
disrespect to that community and its expertise is intended, but,
while those topics, especially on a per-language basis, may be
extremely relevant to registration restrictions, registration
restrictions are out of scope of a protocol discussion.

This, and the subsequent few notes, are just my personal opinion
of course.

     john