Re: [idn] draft-klensin-dns-role-00.txt and the author's presentation

["Brian W. Spolarich" <briansp@walid.com>]

On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Hideyo Imazu wrote:

| Having said that, my interpretation of his presentation is "now is the
| time to rethink and overhaul the current resource locating schemes in
| which DNS has the central role."  After the overhaul we might end up
| having a next generation DNS with directory like feature or some
| hierarchical directory scheme with an innovative design concept.  Or
| we might introduce a generic resource locating layer between
| application and DNS.  All Internet applications including web and
| email would eventually be based on the new resource locating scheme.
| 
| John, is this what you really mean?  Do you have any particular plan to 
| form a BOF or WG for it?  What other IDN folks think?

  I was very intrigued and excited by John's initial 'DNS Role' paper, and
even more so by his presentation yesterday.  I've been feeling for a while
that the DNS as its currently used has been 'overloaded' with a lot of
Extra Stuff, some of it technical, some of it cultural, much of it
problematic, and John's paper articulated this set of concerns much more
clearly than I could have.  Behind this is of course the root cause of the
Great Complaint of every system and network administrator:  "The system
would work great if it weren't for those darned users." :-)

  There's of course a great deal of tension between the direction that
John is pointing towards and (what I believe to be) the constraining
context of the charter of this working group.  Given the lack of extant
directory deployments on anything resembling a global scale I'd hate to
risk further fragmentation by investigating a direction with so much
uncertainty.

  Perhaps the WG should constrain its focus to the problem of representing
ISO10646 sequences in domain names in some rational way, and push these
larger issues into a new DNSng working group effort.  The plan would
therefore be a two phase approach where the ACE solution would be
recognized as an interim solution whose problems (which are identified by
the IDN WG) would be addressed by a directory-based solution.  There would
be built-in incentives for users to migrate to the DNSng as the new
services would presumbably be attractive and compelling enough.

  -bws