Re: A Comment on 9. [1] of the requirements document.

[George Belotsky <george@register.com>]

From RFC 1035, Page 9:

Although labels can contain any 8 bit values in octets that make up a
label, it is strongly recommended that labels follow the preferred
syntax described elsewhere in this memo, which is compatible with
existing host naming conventions.  Name servers and resolvers must
compare labels in a case-insensitive manner (i.e., A=a), assuming ASCII
with zero parity.  Non-alphabetic codes must match exactly.
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From RFC 1035, Page 34:

<domain-name>s make up a large share of the data in the master file.
The labels in the domain name are expressed as character strings and
separated by dots.  Quoting conventions allow arbitrary characters to be
stored in domain names.  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It is quite clear that DNS was intended to support arbitrary
characters (except '\0') in labels, although you were discouraged to
use the functionality.

How widely it is supported, and whether it is useful in our context, is
a different story.

Nevertheless, I did not think we -- as part of a standards-making body --
would be too much hurt by quoting the prior work of that same body accurately
in our documents.

If this is not the case, then I am very sorry to have bothered all of you.

George.




On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 03:32:46PM -0400, Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine wrote:
> 7-bit store would alter alignment semantics, and should 8th bit semantics
> attach (in the conjectured future of 1035), require stateful encoding of
> primary-to-store, and stateful decodings of store-to-primary.
> 
> Terminator labels (other than NULL) introduce the iso2022 escape problem,
> or memory-aligned stateful encoding.
> 
> "avoid stateful store and escapes" is not equivalent to "use all 8 bits"
> 
> Eric

-- 
-----------------------------
George Belotsky
Senior Software Architect
Register.com, inc.
george@register.com
212-798-9127 (phone)
212-798-9876 (fax)