Message for Bind-users

[Alan J Rosenthal]

Kevin Darcy <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> writes:
>flaps at dgp.toronto.edu wrote:
>> A working system doesn't need multiple ways to do the same thing.
>> Hyphens suffice.
>
>Well, we don't *need* DNS at all: everyone could just use dot-notation IP
>addresses, or, for that matter, strings of 1's and 0's.

I think that giving names to these numbers is a "thing" as I use the word
above, i.e. I think it is a goal worth accomplishing.  I also think that
introducing a word separator is a "thing" worth accomplishing.  But I
don't think we need TWO different ways to accomplish this latter "thing".
Hyphens suffice.

>DNS, and underscores, enhance the human/computer interface, or at least
>are perceived to by many of the humans who use the interface.

I feel that having underscores AND hyphens would not enhance the
human-computer interface.  I think that having only one of them makes
hostnames more compatible with the way people process text.  A hyphen or
an underscore both mean that it is a word separation.  To distinguish them
seems to me to be similar to a proposal to make domain names case-sensitive.
In other words, just like case-insensitivity, I think that having only one
of hyphen and underscore (or, for that matter, considering them equivalent
just like 'A' and 'a', although this would be too weird) is a *better*
"human-computer interface".

Actually this is a bit odd coming from someone whose domain name is two words
and you don't even use a hyphen.  But I see that you (collectively,
not necessarily you personally) registered both daimlerchrysler.com and
daimler-chrysler.com.  Are you saying you want to have to register also
daimler_chrysler.com?

More fundamentally, in another article you complain, with respect to existing
software not accepting underscores:
>So, the rules exist to prevent people from causing incompatibilities. And
>the incompatibilities happen because of blind enforcement of the rules.

This is quite wrong.  The *compatibilities* happen because of blind
enforcement of the rules.  I would myself say "complete enforcement" instead
of "blind enforcement", but I'm not sure there's a technical difference.
Private changes to network protocols are what results in incompatibilities
(e.g. starting to use underscores without following the public standards
process).  The standards say no underscores; following this standard results
in compatibility.  DNS does work.  If you want underscores, propose a change
to the standard, but I think that that change would be stupid and I don't
predict success.  Mostly, we *do* have to agree on it, you can't make your
own rules.