Re: [idn] Re: hostname history hell

[John C Klensin <klensin@jck.com>]

--On Tuesday, 20 November, 2001 15:16 -0500 Eric
Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <brunner@nic-naa.net> wrote:

> eric,
> 
> as i thought, "3.*." was both valid, post-1123, and worked too.

There is a RFC 1591 rule/ comment that notes that no TLD has an
all-numeric name and implies that one would never be approved.
1591 is also, if I recall, where the "one character" prohibition
originates.  The reason for the latter was mostly human factors
-- the small amount of redundancy in AA.*.* over A.*.* is
actually fairly significant -- plus an element of
nonsense-avoidance.

The reason for this should be fairly obvious, although again
more from a human interface standpoint than a DNS-technical one.
While the DNS will resolve (or not) whatever it is called with,
people and applications might have trouble figuring out whether
10.250.250.1 is a DNS name or an [IPv4] address.

> when bill, donald, and i were working on what became 2929 we
> discussed 2-octet lables (first left of ".") that were outside
> of the current 3166 set, both as 7-bit and as 8-bit labels.
> there was no reason other than convention, and now icann, to
> not use ".3." as the first label after dot, at least in theory.

As long as 1591 is considered "convention", this is certainly
correct.

     john