On Sat, Jun 28, 2008 at 08:46:33AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote: > Yes. It completely marginalizes the remaining positive qualities of the > Domain Name System as a way to find things, in the name of giving people > "more options."
The Domain Name System is not now, and never has been, away to *find* things, anymore than 123 Elm St, Worcester MA is a way to *find* a house. It's a way to *denote* things, uniquely. You *find* an address by looking in a map directory, and then on the map. You find things on the Internet using a search engine, and the second-order derivatives. > Let me start by saying that I believe that the trends in the DNS have been > going the wrong way for well over a decade. The insistence on the part of > many that the namespace be flattened is just a poor choice. People are now > used to trying "<foo>.com" to reach a company. In some cases, this makes > fair sense; I can see why "ibm.com" or "seagate.com" are that way, even > though in some cases there are namespace collisions with other trademarks. "Famous trademarks". > In others, it's ridiculous - why the heck do I get someplace in California > when I go to "martyspizza.com", rather than our local very excellent pizza > place? (sadly this example is less effective now, they managed to get > "martyspizza.net" a few years back). Sure. Local collisions are inevitable. Blocker Transfer, a local moving company client of mine, wanted to register a domain back in 1997... when the company was 99 years old. blocker.com was taken. They took blocker100.com, and promoted it. > We never had any business allowing small, local businesses to register in > .com, or non-networking companies to register in .net, or non-organizations > in .org... but a whole generation of Internet "professionals" "knew better" > and the end result at the end of the road is that DNS will end up being > almost as useless as IPv4 numbers for identifying the more obscure bits of > the Internet. Correct; this is exactly the problem. But a lot of it stems, Joe, from the misconception you led with. > It would have been much better for us to fix some of the obvious problems > with DNS back in the day. Instead, we didn't bother, and instead allowed > "market forces" to dictate what happened next. This of course got buyers > whatever they wanted (which was generally "short names!"), but what buyers > wanted didn't necessarily map well into what would have made sense for > /users/ of the system, which would have been "predictability of names." See all the debates about area code overlays vs splits, and the extension of US telephone Directory Numbers to 12 digits. > We are now reaping the evolution of that into even further mayhem. Yep. > I look forward to many more years of having to remember that Marty's > Pizza is "martyspizza.net" instead of "martyspizza.brookfield.wi.us", > that Milwaukee's Department of Public Works is at "mpw.net" instead of > "dpw.ci.milwaukee.wi.us", etc. I am, in turn, very pleased with a lot of my local municipalities. Some of them, admittedly, *have* silly pinellascounty.org or pinellas-park.com names, but they also answer to the long-form .fl.us names you would prefer. Sometimes they redirect one way, sometimes the other; sometimes each domain merely overlays the other. But at least they are, as you say, deterministic. I don't think it's fixable anymore, either. But I remain determined to spit into the wind, Jim notwithstanding. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink [EMAIL PROTECTED] Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274 Those who cast the vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything. -- (Joseph Stalin)
