On Thu, 08 March 2001, Joshua Goodall wrote:
The whole idea of unique human-readable names is broken (I would go as far as to say that the idea of any global name space is silly :)
It shouldn't be. The great mistake with DNS was allowing a hierarchical network engineering convenience to *become* a flat namespace used as a globally-unique identifier for bodies of data.
Somewhere along the process, DNS changed from an address space to to subject space. As an address space, having globally-unique identifiers is important; but as a subject space, searching is more complicated because identifiers aren't unique. Think of the difference between the telephone white pages, and the telephone yellow pages. Or the difference between searching for a book in the library by subject heading, and searching for an street address in a city. Ok, so I wrote the authority control software for MARION database, so I'm a bit biased about how things should work. For example, suppose there is a large corporation which likes to go by the name Disney, and several individuals whose name is Disney. http://www.colapl.org/MARION?key=disney&ind=A Who has priority? Walt Disney, Roy Disney, Rosemary Disney, Dorthy Disney, or Doris Disney? Why does any of them need to have priority over the name used for lookups? If you want their globally unique address (i.e. to send them mail) its not mandatory for it to be the same as the name you search for. How do you go from the name everyone uses, to the "official" name for something. http://www.colapl.org/MARION?key=ibm&ind=A What if someone is trying to find the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company? Other than generating a lot of press, new.net's project doesn't seem to be anything more exciting than a bunch of AOL Keywords (another flat proprietary namespace). DNS is not, nor ever was intended to be a general purpose search tool. That was X.400/X.500's job :-) If someone wanted to do something interesting, they would come up with a new RESOLVER library and interface which searched on something at a higher level than DNS names.