- From: John C Klensin <klensin@mci.net>
- Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 09:04:52 -0500 (EST)
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: uri@bunyip.com
On Wed, 12 Nov 1997 12:29:53 -0800 (PST) Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com> wrote: > draft-ietf-ipngwg-aaaa-00.txt > > proposes another method which would work for including IPv6 addresses: > > An IPv6 address is represented as a name in the IP6.INT domain by a > sequence of nibbles separated by dots with the suffix ".IP6.INT". The > sequence of nibbles is encoded in reverse order, i.e. the low-order >... Larry, I was hoping that someone else would pick up on this, but... (i) b.a.9.8.7.6.5.0.4.0.0.0.3.0.0.0.7.0.0.0.1.0.0.0.0.0.0.0.1.2.3.4.IP6.INT. is amazingly disgusting and the chance that humans could get it right is pretty nearly zero. Quoting a few colons, if needed, seems much less painful. (ii) One of the general assumptions about IPv6 is that renumbering will occur fairly frequently. That will make use of explicit addresses in URLs a fairly bad idea and something we don't want to encourage (I suppose the above form would have that effect, but, still...). (iii) I don't know what has gotten into the heads of the IPng WG, but the only good place for using literal addresses is when the DNS isn't working or isn't available. Doing something that requires DNS resolution creates a nasty recursion loop problem; designing something that requires special-casing within a subdomain (when the TLD and its other subdomain are handled normally) strikes me as incredibly bad design. (iv) you might want to take a look at the address literal discussion in draft-ietf-drums-smtpupd-NN. It is pretty terrible and would require escapes, but might a better approach than inventing something separate for URLs. john
Received on Monday, 17 November 1997 09:04:53 UTC