On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 08:04:11PM +0100, Matthias Leisi wrote: > And this counts as "fairly serious damage to the DNS protocol"? This > seems like a *tiny* bit exaggerated. The DNS is a distributed, loosely-coherent database of typed data. If we start throwing away the types, it seems like pretty serious damage to me. When my DNS client gets back an A record from what appears to be a DNS server answering DNS queries according to the standard DNS protocol, it ought to be able to rely on the the A record containing a host address, because that's what an A record is defined as containing (by RFC 1035). But the DNSxL document describes using A records such that that the RDATA contains something that looks like a host address, _but that isn't_. There's no way to tell that such is the case except by knowing the context of the query and the contents of the response. What this does is make the answer different _in kind_ depending on its content. Note that this isn't like the (otherwise lamentable) example of TXT records being used as protocol elements -- they at least were always defined as being nothing more strongly typed than text strings. If the "protocol" as described in the -dnsbl- draft does not do violence to the DNS protocol, then I guess I don't know what would. I thought this argument was plain in the original note Olafur and I sent, but I gather technical comments of this nature might have been lost in the fog (well, flames, in this case) of war. I hope the above clarifies. I should observe that I'm not so naive as to suppose the existing use is going to disappear any time soon. That's a poor reason, in my opinion, for turning a bad use into a "standard" of any kind, when we can instead document the existing (bad) use for everyone's information, and suggest an alternative that accomplishes the same goal without causing the same harm. If that's not the point of an interoperability-focussed network standards organization, I guess I also don't know what we're doing here. A -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@xxxxxxxxxxxx Shinkuro, Inc. _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf