Date: Thu, 27 Jul 1995 07:48:42 -0700 From: Paul A Vixie <paul@vix.com>
The whole point of a name space is to make things easier to remember.
This is the old invariant. It's varied. I'm still waiting for a proposal for a hierarchy which will hold 25,000,000 names and still have them all easy to remember, or easy to guess from external knowledge.
The new "whole point of" the DNS name space is to provide names which change less often than IP addresses change. If we could do just that we'd be winning.
I'd like to question that 25e6 figure. It's one "mid-to-large" (to quote you) company in the US for every 10 inhabitants. Really? Is it perhaps a world figure instead? If we want a hash that's easy to compute from the company name, use the first three characters of the name, not something which requires external knowledge. It certainly does not solve the name-conflict problem, but it does provide sufficient division of the namespace to make the load on any one branch bearable, both for name service and for registration. Barney Wolff <barney@databus.com>