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Re: [ietf-dkim] (registered) domain name (Re: errata revision: opaque)

2009-03-27 01:57:20
Hi Dave,
At 15:49 26-03-2009, Dave CROCKER wrote:
The best I can find is two kinds of distinction.  The term 
"hostname" refers to
a constraint on use of the full Domain Name namespace.  The term "registered"
appears to be the way of distinguishing names that appear in the operational
service, ie, the public database.

The problem with this document is that it is not a specification 
about DNS and the reader may not restrict his/her interpretation to 
that only.  People commonly view the term "registered" as meaning 
that the domain name has been registered through a registry.  You can 
get away with that by specifying "registered in DNS".  Generally, we 
don't have to go to such lengths as it is implicit that the domain 
name should be resolvable.  Given the amount of debate we have been 
having about DKIM, some people might prefer to have all the details 
nailed down so that we don't have to argue about this again in 
future.  Some people will come up and say that "registered in DNS" 
means that the domain name must also be registered through a registry.

    A single domain name -> A single, syntactically valid domain name

I don't know and I prefer not to know, whether there are 
syntactically invalid domain names. :-)  If I want to know what a 
"single domain name" is, I'll see what the RFCs say.  My statement is 
not a case of "the RFC says so" as I am not an advocate of such an 
argument.  I refer to the relevant text as, in my eyes, it provides a 
good explanation as to why we do things in a particular manner.

There isn't any requirement that DKIM must only be used on the public 
Internet.  In practice, most users of the technology will be on the 
Internet.  Let's agree about the term without constraining where DKIM 
can be used.

I suggest using "a domain name".  I don't see the point of having 
"single" in that text as the public key retrieval will fail if we use 
more than one domain name.  If the WG wants to be precise, I'm fine 
with that.  The interpretation of domain name here is within the 
context of DNS.  For those of you who don't understand what that 
means, please talk with the DNS folks.  They are highly skilled in 
the art of frustrating application designers when that question is raised. :-)

Regards,
-sm  

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