On Wed, 14 Mar 2001, Mathew Butler wrote:
The problem is, of course, that it's NOT human-to-human communication. It's machine-to-machine communication, and human-to-machine communication, and DNS was designed to create a mnemonic representation of a way to reach a machine.
If it is machines communicating there's no need to do any mnemonics. In fact, it is still humans communicating, with the aid of the machines. So... we have two design constraints: 1) people need to be able to locate and revisit somethings in the network 2) any meaningful hierarchial labeling of the real world is quite impossible, and runs into problems of scaling, adversity, and entrenched notions of ownership. Propping up DNS as-is only guarantees that the whole thing is going to be pushed off the cliff on the second side. Neither it is very good on the first count. So, instead of trying to fix the broken concept, and raising ridiculous protests and indignation when someone tries to rock the boat, isn't it easier just to go for a real permanent solution? Which is to replace "mnemonic" DNS with something deliberately mnemonic-free (like numeric strings :) and leave the human-interaction part to the better and wildly successful concept of navigation in a general graph. The exising deployed software is nearly sufficient (and in many cases quite adequate) to make this mode of communication easy to use. My proposal is to create a special hierarchy (similar to tpc.int) which can _only_ be used to register numeric "names" on first-come first-served basis. The "current" DNS then can go down in flames, for all i care. Actually, I think this is inevitable, since some day someone will find a way to win a lawsuit against the whatever central naming authority is. Anyone who thinks numeric IDs do not work when "better" alphanumeric IDs are possible needs to take a look at the ICQ. It is _very_ successful in case you didn't notice. And so is telephony. And in case you didn't notice that most people in the world do not speak english, and do not use latin script, let me tell you the simple (and quite obvious to someone who is not spoiled by American isolationism) fact: for the majority of world population ASCII strings are only marginally better than numbers in being "mnemonic" - and it is much easier to pronounce numbers in a native language. --vadim