Re: Some more possible requirements

["Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org>]

At 09:28 00/01/07 -0800, Andrew Draper wrote:
> > Me too! SOMEONE apart from Marc, James, Rob and me must have opinions!
> 
> OK, here are my thoughts on requirements, my background is that at in
> previous jobs I a) was internal DNS administrator for a medium sized company
> and b) wrote a DNS resolver library.

Hello Andrew - Great list of requirements, except that
I don't understand some of them, because they are not
specific enough, or because I don't understand DNS enough.


> * Zone files should remain easily editable.

Yes, but what does that mean? Does 'easily editable' mean
ASCII only? Does it mean a local encoding? Or what? What kind
of editors/tools are you using or would be ready to use?



> * I should be able to mix different languages in the same zone.
> 
> For example: I should be able to have the name of the UK office in English,
> the French office in French, the Norwegian office in Norwegian and the Thai
> office in Thai, all followed by .mycompany.com.
> 
> One way I might do this is to have the real name of each system in French
> (to make life easier for my French speaking IS staff), and add CNAMES/DNAMES
> to alias things in different languages (to make things easier for users), or
> vice versa.  Or something else.

Good point. This is a refinement on what combinations of labels
and scripts are allowed, and clearly makes sense.


> * The spec should not make me pay registrars many times to register the same
> name.
> 
> Ie if I want banos.com I should not also have to pay for BANOS.com (and all
> the other permutations of upper and lower case if there is more than one
> non-ASCII character).  This implies that I should be able to register some
> sort of canonical form.
> 
> [In case my mail gets garbled, the third character of my example is N-tilde]
> 
> This also holds when I am editing my internal zone files, having a canonical
> form will make my files smaller and easier to maintain.

For some cases, defining a canonical form is easy. For others, it may
be too hard. In some cases, the borderline between a variant of a name
that should be canonicalized and a different but similar name is not
very clear. As an example, should banos.com be treated as an equivalent
of ban^os.com? (sorry, can't type a tilde on my keyboard) Should
banos-ltd.com be treated as an eqivalent of banos.com?

What I can imagine in certain cases is that registrars offer to
register CNAME/DNAME variants for a small price increase. Would
that be acceptable?


> * An IDN capable resolver should not generate any more traffic (for both IDN
> and pure ASCII names) than a non IDN capable resolver.
> 
> This implies that there should be some sort of canonical form which the
> resolver can use for requests.

I would prefer that too, but it's not necessary. It may imply that the
server does the canonicalization. I understand that that's what is
currently done for case folding with ASCII.


Regards,   Martin.






#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, World Wide Web Consortium
#-#-#  mailto:duerst@w3.org   http://www.w3.org