(I'm surprised our philosophy-minded folks didn't answer this. I'll take
a stab, acknowledging that I'm only a philosophy tourist.)
On 30 Mar 2017, at 13:41, Andrew McConachie wrote:
If a domain name is made up of labels, and labels are made up of
octets, then can there be non-digital representations of domain names?
Yes. The octets in the labels can be encoded into writing systems, and
there can be a commonly-recognized display format for the representation
of a group of labels.
For example, if I spray paint 'www.example' on the side of a bus, is
it not a domain name because it is made up of paint instead of octets?
It is a rendering (in paint, on a bus) a domain name in a
commonly-accepted display format. Neither the paint nor the bus is the
domain name.
Some history related to representation versus essence:
https://essenceofbuddhism.wordpress.com/2016/04/19/what-the-finger-pointing-to-the-moon-analogy-really-means-from-zen-buddhism-the-buddha-in-the-shurangama-sutra/
I don't see anything in this document restricting the terms to 'on the
wire' definitions. So I assume that the scope of 'domain name'
includes non-digital instantiations. Perhaps what's needed isn't so
much a new definition for label, but clarification on the scope of
these terms and their definitions.
I'm not sure that us going into the ontology of domain names would help
someone reading the document.
--Paul Hoffman
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