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

Eric Brunner-Williams ebw at abenaki.wabanaki.net
Tue Mar 10 03:19:11 CET 2009


Vint,

What is the case that 
141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592. is 
"bad". Lyman's probably got cases out to 8 digits in the label, but how 
about the rest?

The "no nums without alphas" nonsense comes from the current ICANN 
attempt to specify what can go into the IANA root. I don't mind random 
gorp passing as good policy, but things that are represented as 
technical requirements MUST, in the usual sense, be correct or subject 
to correction. Pi may break my calorie budget, but it isn't going to 
break root.

Finally, as chair, what you think is easier to implement is interesting, 
but is it sufficient, or necessary, to characterize specification? 
Having stuffed bits of P3P evaluation mechanism (lots of ugly xml, and 
for cookies, lots of equally ugly key-value pairs) into mozilla, I'm OK 
with applications wasting a lot of programmer and run-time to deal with 
questions like "is this thing an address or is it a domain name or is it 
something else?"

And the inet_addr(3) thing has been around for a long, long time. I 
recall writing it, and not for the first time, in XPG/1, in 1986.

Eric

Vint Cerf wrote:
> Eric,
>
> I did not say to ban digits at all levels (and ENUM is an example of 
> use of digits that does not cause confusion, for instance).
>
> The limitation in the TLD space does have the benefit that no domain 
> name would have the property that it could be confused with an IP 
> address. I think that is simpler to implement than trying to check how 
> many labels there are in the domain name, and if four labels, can it 
> be interpreted as an IP address. As Lyman Chapin points out, some 
> decimal values are interpreted as 32 bit values and thus as IPv4 
> addresses by some systems.
>
> I am only speaking of the TLD label space here, and not lower level 
> TLDs.  I don't know whether that makes a difference to you?
>
> v
>
>
> Vint Cerf
> Google
> 1818 Library Street, Suite 400
> Reston, VA 20190
> 202-370-5637
> vint at google.com
>
>
>
>
> On Mar 9, 2009, at 6:44 PM, Eric Brunner-Williams wrote:
>
>> Vint,
>>
>> Your position then is that because _people_ may mistake sequences of 
>> digits as addresses, that labels  be constrained to contain at least 
>> one non-digit character, with the same constraint expressed for octal 
>> and hex labels?
>>
>> Everyone has their own notion of what constitutes acceptable 
>> dumbness, and anyone who thinks that
>>
>> 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.
>>
>> is an ip address (the name is taken from one of my favorite .com 
>> examples) is not doing us any favors by insisting that we design 
>> around his or her grasp of the details. Other than by going blind, 
>> one space at a time (oh the joy of cards punched long forgotten, and 
>> OS dumps before the invention of symbolic debuggers, also mercifully 
>> long forgotten), what is the difference between the above and the 
>> following:
>>
>> 3.141592653589793238462643383279S02884197169399375105820974944592.
>>
>> Did an infix alpha really buy us anything?
>>
>> Also, it simply isn't useful to state "DNS specs are not the sole 
>> guide to conventions" without some specifics. What do we use? Augury?
>>
>> I'm not keen on making the mistaken rule that "." in a string handed 
>> to a resolver is punctuation and has a weak directionality property, 
>> but if that has any use at all, that is, a limit on leading and 
>> trailing digits, I'd prefer to see it at the registry, as local 
>> policy, not the protocol, where independent of the directionality of 
>> the label, or even the recourse to punycode, the policy is global, 
>> and mostly incorrect.
>>
>> Eric
>>
>> Vint Cerf wrote:
>>> 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
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Idna-update mailing list
>>>> Idna-update at alvestrand.no
>>>> http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/idna-update
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>
>
>


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