Re: [idn] Re: hostname history hell

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

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

> 1591 Domain Name System Structure and Delegation. J. Postel.
> March      1994. (Format: TXT=16481 bytes) (Status:
> INFORMATIONAL)
> 
> informational, not normative, and reflecting a nation-state's
> policy of the epoch, not the dns. modernly, see 2606.

Eric,

This is a dead horse that is not, IMO, worth kicking.  BCP did
not exist at the time, and probably would not have been used
anyway.  RFC 1591 was an IANA policy statement.  Neither it, nor
any of the other IANA policy documents went through the IETF
process (although most or all were reviewed by most of the IAB,
which was the standards-approving body at the time).  The RFC
Editor considered all of them to be informational --they
provided information to the community about what the IANA was
doing-- just as it considered its/their own policy documents
informational.  But those "informational" documents had, in many
respects, far more authority than "standards".   Standards were
voluntary; compliance, at the top level, with IANA policy
statements was mandatory, as many people, yourself included if I
recall, who tried to obtain top-level "country code" domains for
entities not on the 3166 list found out.

So the hair-splitting you are attempting here really does not
usefully work, IMO.

>> people and applications might have trouble figuring out
>> whether 10.250.250.1 is a DNS name or an [IPv4] address.
 
> One things for sure, whatever ".1." is, it isn't a 3166 code
> point.

Indeed.  But Jon also flatly refused to consider
single-character TLD names, for reasons discussed elsewhere.
Only the two-character ones were required to be 3166 alpha-1
codes.  So 10.250.250.250 might have been a better example, but
I assume(d) everyone would get the point.

> Use of numeric hostnames is not surprising, e.g., 3721.com,
> for lots of reasons. Anyway, neither people nor apps are the
> dns.

Yes. But ignoring the apps gets the IDN WG into a silly state
(and has, already, several times).

     john