There's talk about protocol switches. I think that's a misnomer. There are resolution switches. I see a lot of utility in it being the top-level name in a Domain Name. (I'm not ready to say that's the best way to go.)
Until .onion, the protocol switch for all of the special names was at the point where you map a name into an IP address, since localhost and .local give you a real IP that you use the same way as any other IP. You can open a TCP socket for web or submit, you can send UDP packets for DNS, you can send ICMP packets for ping. For .test, .example. and .invalid. the mapping always fails.
Now .onion comes along and the switch is at a different layer, at whatever level SOCKS is. You can open TCP-like virtual circuits, you might be able to do DNS if your SOCKS driver simulates UDP, you can't do ping ping, since SOCKS doesn't simulate ICMP.
.onion is a special case for a variety of reasons, but it's not clear to me whether people think that slicing at the SOCKS level rather than the address resolution level is an exception, or we will be defining a new application API for every new special name.
R's, John _______________________________________________ DNSOP mailing list DNSOP@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dnsop
