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Path: utzoo!watmath!deepthot!jonah
From: jonah@deepthot.UUCP (Jeff Lee)
Newsgroups: net.mail,net.mail.headers
Subject: Re: RFC920 domains vs. cow patties (flame)
Message-ID: <532@deepthot.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Jun-85 20:17:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: deepthot.532
Posted: Sun Jun  9 20:17:24 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Jun-85 22:13:11 EDT
References: <918@sdcsvax.UUCP>
Organization: UWO CS, London Canada
Lines: 38
Keywords: domains NIC rfc920
Xref: watmath net.mail:888 net.mail.headers:471

Joel,
	I'd like to take you up on your offer of a copy of RFC920.  I
don't know what the latest word is, but the domain/subdomain naming
conventions outlined in RFC819 are too restricting.  I agree that a
geographically related addressing scheme could be appealing, but it
does have problems.  Who, for instance, is responsible for creating
the addresses, or ensuring their uniqueness.  Likewise, with sparce
electronic networks, a machine down the street may be harder to get
to than one in the next state.  At least organizationally structured
domains make the addresses of electronically "near" machines similar,
reducing the address -> routing burden for small machines.  Perhaps
someday there will be a strongly coupled network which will make
geographical naming practical.

	My personal "flame" is that (at least as of RFC819), it does
not seem to be possible to create sub-domains which are largely 
independant of their surrounding domains.  The requirement that local
host and sub-domain names must be disjoint from the local host and
sub-domain names of all "ancestor" domains is only enforcable if coupled
with strong policing of name allocation.  Relaxing this so that local
names need only be disjoint from the names of its "ancestor" domains,
and not their children, would make name allocation much simpler, and
would only make outgoing addresses one domain longer.  That is, instead
of omitting the entire common portion of source and domain addresses,
the sender would omit all but the least most encompassing domain name.

	This would also make it easier for small, local domains to
get access to the world.  All they need is for a larger domain to
"sponsor" them, and route all mail to one or two gateways known to
the sponsoring network.  Routing within the smaller domain need only
be a concern of the gateways.  Let's here it for the small guy!

	Am I flaming to no end?  Has this already be suggested?  Please
let me know.
-- 
jonah	(Jeff Lee @ Dept. of Comp. Sci., The University of Western Ontario)
UUCP:   ...!decvax!{utzoo|watmath}!deepthot!jonah
MLNET:  jonah@deepthot.UWO