Re: [registrars] Request for Reserved Names WG Volunteers

[brunner@xxxxxxxxxxx]

John,

Your note on the subject of single octet labels was forwarded to the ICANN
RC mailing list, where I saw it.


When Donald, Bill and I wrote 2929 we also considered the in the context
of IANA Considerations for DNS Resource Records, the RR NAME included.

At the time, there were no ICANN considerations, and no IDN, so the whole
mistake of Unicode hadn't yet happened.

I no longer have the correspondence that circulated between Donald and I
in particular, but we had some discussion related to the issue, circa
1999/2000, which is observable in the lack of overspecification for the
values of octets used to construct lables (Section 3.3), and the care we
took to document the RR CLASS (Section 3.2).

If memory serves, Donald wanted to nail down the US-ASCII values for
each octet, and prevent any octet sequence other than the iso3166 and
c/n/o sequences from ever being available for allocation.

I think I made the case for future extension that might use values
other than .-0-9A-Za-z, and that lables might be made from sequences
not in the two-octet (iso3166) or three-octet (c/n/o et al) string
spaces.


Which begs the question of what John's intent was, or whether I then, or
ever, have had the smallest part of a clue. 

Of course, at that point in time, we weren't trying to see characters
through the blinders of font fanatics, so phishing was limited to il1
and o0O bits of nonsense which policy, at either the registry, or the
registrar or the zone file publishers, could have (and at times did)
interposed upon.

Cheers,
Eric