>> Doubtful. If a record needs to have, say, a priority field, or a port number, >> given the existence of MX, SRV, and various other RRs it's going to be very >> difficult for the designers of said field to argue that that should be done as >> ASCII text that has to be parsed out to use. > >Agree with you but too many people today "just" program in perl och python where the parsing is just a cast or similar, and they do not >understand this argument of yours -- which I once again completely stand behind myself. Honestly, if new RR types were all text to be parsed by clients, a la SPF and DKIM, that wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. The main advantage of a new RR type is that clients can ask for it specifically and know that any they answer they get is that kind of data, as opposed to overloaded TXT where you get what you get. If the DNS records have binary fields, the parsing happens in the DNS server. If they're text, the parsing happens in the client. Back when the DNS was young, the suggestion that clients would have to parse the records would have seemed nuts. Now mail clients parse multiple SPF and DKIM records on every mail transaction and nobody cares. An advantage of parsing in the server is that you catch syntax records earlier, but that's still no guarantee that the data are valid. (For example, see the MX data for international.com, which caused a mail loop I fixed yesterday.) An advantage of parsing in the client is that the parser is in code managed by people who care about it, rather than managed by some distant DNS operator. I suppose that unparsed records mean that the server can't add additional section records, but based on yesterday's discussion, it sounds like nobody's using them any more, so who cares? -- Regards, John Levine, johnl@xxxxxxxx, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf