NAVYJOBS.COM

Tue Apr 23 07:07:30 UTC 1996

On Tue, 23 Apr 1996, Jeremy Porter wrote:

> the price point drops.  (Which could happen, 2.5 billion
> people on the Net in 6 years...)

I think the number of people with a phone at home is less than that. Don't
forget that most of the world's population lives in China and
underdevelopped countries.

> We are quite limited by the fact that the DNS protocols seem
> to limit us to [A-Z][a-z][1-0]-_.  We would be really bad off
> if the DNS implementers had used UNICODE.

Assuming 9 letters in a domain name this would be 37 ^ 9 which
is 1.29e14. I think that leaves a fair amount of room for choice
considering that some domains will be more or less than 9 characters
and there are currently over 100 top level domains with more planned.

> >The plans to open up the top level domain space by adding 15 or more new
> >international top level domains per year will make the landscape rather
> >more interesting.  http://www.kirk.tlhIngan.alt :-)
> 
> Who has proposed this? I don't see it happening.

ftp://ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/internet-drafts/draft-ymbk-itld-admin-00.txt

> A. it won't scale

Then push for the "million domains" experiment to go forward sooner
rather than later. This pushes the scaling one level deeper in the tree
so if scale problems do develop we can simply open another subtree. Only
at the top level do we need to worry about scale, but there should be no
problem with 2 or 3 times the current number of TLD's.

> B. it looks ugly

Maybe you misunderstand. tlhIngan is the Klingon language word for
"klingon" thus the English equivalent would be http://www.kirk.klingon.alt
This is no uglier than http://www.apple.austin.tx.us

> I think more TLD will be opened, but it will be for
> a couple of reasons, first off some re-writes DNS so that
> the clunky concept of a "root" name server is dead, 

I see.  Well then, you will probably be interested in the new Internet
technology for transporting live humans across the net that was being
discussed on the inet-access list this past month. There is an archive of
inet-access available at ftp.earth.com if you would like see how 
Internet Service Providers are currently handling this. 

Obsmiley ;-)

any directory service needs a place to start the search. That's what the
roots are for and I don't think anything could possibly replace them
except a different set of roots or a different kind of root. The concept
is inherent in the system.

Michael Dillon                                    Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc.                                 Fax: +1-604-546-3049
http://www.memra.com                             E-mail: michael at memra.com