- From: Daniel LaLiberte <liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu>
- Date: Wed, 26 Feb 1997 01:20:27 -0600 (CST)
- To: touch@isi.edu
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
touch@isi.edu writes: > > |the DNS provides globally-unique, location-independent names. > > > > If a FQDNs are locations, how does DNS provide > > location-independent names? > > We're confusing the term location here, as is probably obvious. > > The DNS provides globally-unique, > (geographically) location-independent names. > > FQDNs are locations, just not geographic ones. Locations and names are both relative to some context. FQDNs are looked up in the context of the well-known global DNS root. Whether you call them names or locations is irrelevant if you just call them identifiers that are looked up in some context. An identifier that cannot be looked up in some context is not very useful. (But as Terry Allen would point out, it can still be useful for comparison with other identifiers if you know that they were uniquely created.) I'd say that FQDNs are IP-independent and leave it at that. Maybe URNs should just be called URL-independent, but there are still problems with that, namely that they live in the same URI space. As a matter of fact, you can look up IP numbers in a special branch of DNS. -- Daniel LaLiberte (liberte@ncsa.uiuc.edu) National Center for Supercomputing Applications http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~liberte/
Received on Wednesday, 26 February 1997 02:20:49 UTC