A-label definition

Frank Ellermann hmdmhdfmhdjmzdtjmzdtzktdkztdjz at gmail.com
Tue Jun 24 02:30:59 CEST 2008


Mark Andrews wrote:

>> If you think it helps we could move RFC 952 to HISTORIC,
>> it muddies the water when it shows up in ICANN documents
>> published in 2008.
 
>> The decruft experiment (RFC 4450) missed RFC 952, because 
>> it was limited to standards, excluding "status: unknown".
 
> It is the current RFC that limits hostnames to LDH.  -GW
> and -NIC etc. are just shoulds not musts.

RFC 1035 claims that RFC 952 "specifies the format of 
HOSTS.TXT, the host/address table replaced by the DNS."
                                  ^^^^^^^^
RFC 1035 says "63", not "24", it is an Internet Standard, it
was updated by RFC 1123, another STD.  And it defines LDH.

For what purpose do you onsider RFC 952 as current ? It has
in essence the same LDH concept, only limited to "24".  I'm
not *generally* opposed to old RFCs with an unknown status,
but RFC 952 is (apparently) "de facto" obsolete.  It's just
that nobody bothered to note the fact "officially" so far.

> To move RFC 952 to historic we need to write a RFC which
> consolidates all the changes to hostnames: syntax, lengths
> etc. into one document.

Okay, I wanted an "updates: 1123" for the <toplabel> issue,
we don't need "updates: 1035" because RFC 1123 already did
this, but adding "obsoletes: 952" to idnabis-rationale is
a possibility.  But I don't see the necessity to justify an
"obsoletes: 952" in an IDNAbis memo.  Unlike the <toplabel>
bug, that is IMO required for IDNAbis, and it doesn't belong
into say 2606bis.

We could of course also fix this bug in a separate IDNAbis
memo, and while at it add an "obsoletes: 952" - short RFCs
are good.  Is that what you propose ? 

 Frank



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