Re: HTML5 and Public Suffix

On Thu, 29 Jan 2009, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> 
> I don't pretend to begin to understand document.domain or how
> important it is; but as I've argued every time the topic has come up,
> http://publicsuffix.org is a bad idea.

Well as far as HTML5 goes, I don't really care what solution we use, we 
just need something. Right now the public suffix list is all that we have, 
and for all its alleged problems, it works in a pretty significant number 
of cases, which is better than the alternatives at the moment.

If a better solution comes along, I'd be glad to use it instead.

Our requirements are:

 * given a domain/hostname, it should be possible to determine if this is 
   a domain whose next level can have hosts from different authorities.
   Specifically, the desire here is to be able to distinguish 
   foo.example.com/bar.example.com (which is fine) from 
   example.com/sample.com (which is not).

 * it shouldn't require synchronous network access to determine if 
   something is a public suffix or not (i.e. given a domain/hostname, one 
   should be able to determine where the break from public to private 
   space happens ahead of time, maybe by network access, so that when 
   the answer is actually needed, it is available immediately). 
   Additionally, the less network access is needed the better. 
   (Downloading a whole table once a day is better than five UDP packets 
   per domain.)

 * it shouldn't be spoofable (i.e. it should not be possible for a public 
   component to be labelled as a private component). It's ok if private 
   components get marked as public ones, though.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Thursday, 29 January 2009 20:17:06 UTC