numeric (ascii) labels (was: Re: draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi)

[Vint Cerf]

Eric,

On blackberry, so very briefly, DNS specs are not the sole guide to conventions. I think much pain would be avoided if we banned all numeric TLDs since this would assure no possible confusion of a host name and a IP address. Banning initial and trailing numerics might have bidi benefits but perhaps concerns there could be confined within the bidi rule set.

V

----- Original Message -----
From: Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net>
To: John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com>
Cc: Lyman Chapin <lyman at acm.org>; Martin Duerst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>; Andrew Sullivan <ajs at shinkuro.com>; Vint Cerf; idna-update at alvestrand.no <idna-update at alvestrand.no>
Sent: Mon Mar 09 10:26:54 2009
Subject: numeric (ascii) labels (was: Re: draft-liman-tld-names-00.txt and bidi)

Howdy,

When the preliminary language to what is now ICANN's Guidebook for 
Applicants (GfA, but it has several alternate TLAs, just to be amusing), 
contained the "no numeric label" language, in decimal, octal and hex 
forms, I spent some time, initially with Kurt Pritz, and later with Olaf 
Nordling, to explain the  inet_addr(3) issue.

The language didn't change in GfAv2, issued two weeks ago, though 
someone did explain, as Lyman did below, that there is software which 
does the wrong thing. The GfAv2 text, like Lyman's, doesn't fully treat 
the cases to find the set of constraints which will allow a sequence of 
labels, some of which are numeric, to be strictly interpreted as a name, 
rather than as an address.

In the history of ICANN's "new gTLD" effort(s), software which does the 
wrong thing has been ignored, e.g., the "terminal labels have length 4 
or less" error (.arpa and the three and two ascii sequence labels, 
resulting in the temporary clobbering of .museum and other new gTLDs), 
and software which does the wrong thing has been controlling, e.g., the 
"email addresses are formed of 7-bit octet sequences" (a rationale for 
"A" in "IDNA"), the consequences are still before us today.

My personal view is that broken code that isn't a defacto specification 
of the DNS, or broken specifications of things other than the DNS, need 
to go find their authors and get fixed, and not become dejure nuances of 
the "corrected" specifications of the DNS. In particular, it is 
reasonable for any zone admin, the IANA included, to make a 
registry-local rule reflecting momentary annoyance at the existence of 
well-known bugs, but that no such "rule" should be internalized to the 
DNS specs, with a vastly longer shelf-life than the random DNS 
(mis)using application.

Yes, there is a bug (actually, a shared bug with multiple, possibly 
independent interoperable implementations of obvious brokenness), but 
666 is no different from AAA, and a five label sequence composed of 
numeric (or octal or hex) character values is safe as houses (if ugly), 
and it is possible to constrain allocation of label sequences so that 
label sequences terminating in numeric (or octal or hex) character 
values, and having fewer than five labels, are also not incorrectly 
interpreted by this bug-set as dotted quads.

Of course, ICANN is only a part of the design constraint, and one could 
say "0 is not allowed as a label in .", but the rational would be for 
reasons other than those in the DNS specs -- and in a separate note I'll 
address Limon's draft, which covers some of the issues addressed in 2929.

Eric



John C Klensin wrote:
> --On Saturday, March 07, 2009 11:01 -0500 Lyman Chapin
> <lyman at acm.org> wrote:
>
>   
>> Martin and Andrew,
>>
>> Although it seems that numeric values above 255 would be safe,
>> some   software looks only at the low-order 8 bits of a number
>> encoded in a   16-bit (for example) field (ignoring any
>> high-order bits) when it   "knows" that a numeric value will
>> always be 255 or less. In that case   only the 8 low-order
>> bits (10011010) of 666 (...01010011010) would be   recognized.
>> Entering "666" into such an interface would be equivalent   to
>> entering "154".
>>     
>
> Lyman,
>
> I'm completely confused and don't know what you are talking
> about.  If the issue is domain names, expressed the preferred
> syntax of dot-separated ASCII characters, "666" is as good as
> "ABC" or "ACM".  If the issue is numeric values, the DNS spec
> understand only octets and not, e.g., 16 (UTF-16?) or 32
> (UTF-32/UCS-4) data fields.  The last I looked, it was quite
> hard to fit a decimal number larger than 255 into an octet.
>
> So, what are you saying?
>
>     john
>
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