Bundling of Domain Names and DNAME

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Fri Dec 4 20:58:40 CET 2009


> (1) I strongly believe that it would be good to explore aliasing
> models for the DNS that respond better to user expectations and
> particular requirements in IDN and similar areas than DNAME or
> CNAME. Vaggelis's suggestion for an alias that would work at the
> same level, not below that level in the tree ("xNAME") certainly
> falls into that category.   I believe that such mechanisms would
> be broadly useful, as you suggest above.

This would go a long way to addressing some of my concerns.  I have additional unvoiced concerns that some languages have alternate spellings, and there are sometimes conventions which make it difficult to allow a "correct" and a "short-hand" form without good XNAME type support.  I think this would help a lot.

>  I'd encourage the WG --and the broader community-- to consider the
> other question that the IDNABIS WG was absolutely forbidden to
> consider and that the original IDNA WG rejected early on,
> precisely because it would take too long to deploy.  That
> question involves the set of approaches that would move some
> significant fraction of the matching rules for non-ASCII domains
> to the server side,

Very much agree.  It'll take even longer to deploy if we never start :)

> Long-term, moving more of the work to the server side would also
> make it possible to consider eliminating the use of ACE forms,

Very, Very Much Agree.  We have interesting problems because we support ACE and UTF-8 differently.  A standard specifying out UTF-8 and IDN played together would go a long way to solving those problems.

Given the complexity it should probably be another WG though so we can get done with the current version of IDN.  It might help if we "knew" something was coming in the future for some of these scenarios.

-Shawn


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