Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 09:13:18 -0400 From: Curtis Villamizar <curtis@ans.net>
That a great idea. Just replace the dots in your numeric address with underscore and make it part of the domain name. :-) :-) Then you have to remember that cnidr is in reston and what their numeric address is.
I hope people recognize friendly sarcasm. No offense intended Bill. The whole point of a name space is to make things easier to remember.
Exactly! And there are few schemes as unfriendly as long string of numbers. But that does not mean that the idea is not a good one. Adding a 2 digit random number to the top or second layer of the DNS hierarchy is less than ideal, but mnemonic research has shown that short numbers (actually, up to 4 digits, if I remember the research correctly) are easily remembered, especially when grouped with other familair values. How many people on this list were ever at Paul Vixie's house when he actually was in SF.CA.US? But the mnemonic keys of familiar abbreviations ("SF", "CA", and "US") are still easy for people to remember. Even if people don't know the meaning of the symbols or if they are meaningless, as long as they are short, they are memorable. How many people know what ANS means? I'll bet not nearly as many as know who curtis@ans.net is (in a network, if not personal sense). Adding 2 or 3 random digits to .com would not significantly impact memorability of names any more than old postal zones did. (You must be at least 30 and probably near 40 to remember these ancestors of US ZIP codes.) People would quickly come to "know" that IBM was ibm.49.com just as millions of Americans knew the postal zone of Spiegel, Chicago 9, Ill. John Romkey was one of the first to truly understand the future scope of the network with his "Romkey toaster" comment. About 6 year ago I sat in meetings in DC to discuss the future of Internet directory services and could not get most of the attendees to begin to understand the magnitude of the scaling problem the Internet would someday see. The meeting included many very bright people and the final report (RFC1107) called for planning for directory service to eventually support 10 million users in up to 100,000 organizations in the US. It was explicitly assumed that only the "science and research community" needed be accounted for. My suggestions that these numbers were at least an order of magnitude too small did not get serious attention. But today I would suggest I was also too conservative. The world is a big place and naming on a global basis is a not easy. I believe there will be some ugliness and the sooner we start working on the problem, the sooner we may have a workable, if not wonderful solution. R. Kevin Oberman Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) EMAIL: koberman@llnl.gov Phone: +1 510 422-6955