[vip] The "Invisible Separator Characters" Issue

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Tue, Aug 02, 2011 at 03:41:04PM +0200, JFC Morfin wrote:
> At 11:22 29/07/2011, Nicholas Ostler wrote:
> >>The DNS only have three parameters in a query: {owner, type, class}.
> 
> Incorrect. It also has the prefix and the TLD that can be used to
> support presentation elements.

What do you mean by "prefix" and "TLD"?  I hope you're not trying to
suggest that every DNS lookup is of the form [prefix].TLD.  Certainly,
that is false unless you have a very ideosyncratic interpretation of
the DNS.

Zone cuts in the DNS are there for the administrative convenience _of
the DNS_, and are not in themselves any kind of information about
administrative boundaries for policy.  The misunderstanding of this
distinction, for instance, is a primary reason that http cookies are
subject to so many woeful security problems, and why we have ended up
with preposterous mechanisms like publicsuffix.org.

The reason policy is important and unusual at or near the root is not
because those zones are somehow special, but because they mostly do
delegation out to other operators, so innovations at those points in
the tree are places that can affect a large number of other zones.  

Therefore,

> I think it is time to introduce the concept of "zonale" definition
> file that document the parameters of a TLD relational space.
> For example, the .FRA zonale will document the sensitivity of .FRA
> domain names to majuscule.

if what you are suggesting is that it needs to be possible to track
down certain policy rules about a zone by looking up the location of
such a policy in the DNS, along with rules about what to do if a zone
doesn't come with a policy, then I might agree (and indeed, I
committed during IETF week to put out a draft along these lines).  If
you're suggesting instead that we use the mere fact of the fully
qualified domain name's labels to entail different formatting
conventions, then I predict widespread failure from such simple
inferences.

Best,
A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com