Message for Bind-users

Barry Margolin barmar at genuity.net
Wed Jun 14 17:59:41 UTC 2000


In article <3947C354.67A8043E at daimlerchrysler.com>,
Kevin Darcy  <kcd at daimlerchrysler.com> wrote:
>I'm not suggesting that people violate the standards. I'm suggesting that
>certain standards, or parts of standards, are obsolete and arbitrary and
>unnecessarily restrictive, and that we should a) just simply admit this
>instead of making up bullshit justifications for them and b) change them
>if we can.

But updating the standard is only half the battle, and it's the easy half.
You also have to find and fix any software that's dependent on the old
restrictions.

Admittedly, there probably isn't lots of software that really depends on
the underscore restriction.  That's the reason why so many sites have
gotten away with violating the rule.  But there are some programs that do
enforce it (e.g. the Gauntlet firewall I mentioned in another post), and
they're going to continue to bite us.  Why go to this effort for something
so trivial as underscores?

In another post, someone said that the reason for wanting underscores is
increased naming flexibility.  We already have hyphens, so the main
flexibility this will provide is to have foo-bar.com and foo_bar.com that
are distinct.  Is that really such a good thing?  I envision that it's more
likely to result in trademark battles between the owners of the two
domains.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar at genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.



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