Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi From: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) Newsgroups: comp.mail.uucp Subject: Re: Domain Registration Message-ID: <7518@bsu-cs.bsu.edu> Date: 31 May 89 17:52:39 GMT References: <1105@mailrus.cc.umich.edu> Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.bsu.edu (Rahul Dhesi) Distribution: na Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana Lines: 35 In article karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) writes: >Then I would be able >to take out the morbid special case in my mailer where I detect >.BITNET addresses and foist such mail onto a gateway system of which I >know little. To send mail to a host on BITNET, no system outside BITNET should be required to know any other than "hand this to the nearest BITNET gateway and let it handle delivery". The domain scheme violates this basic modularity principle by wanting hosts on BITNET conform to a non-BITNET naming scheme. You can have "France" as the last line of the address on paper mail, and it will get to France, where the French postal service will be 100% responsible for figuring out where it goes. This is simple, efficient, and requires no country to know anything about internal addresses in any other country, or for addressees to register in some world-wide database scheme. Yes, the postal services could have come up with a scheme in which addresses were entirely unrelated to location, but they are smart enough not to try to maintain and update a world-wide database system of domains when there *already* exists a well-defined set of names (names of countries) that will do just fine. When you are talking about connectivity between two networks such that each network is internally well-connected, and there are gateways between the networks, it seems wrong to me to insist that an address not contain information that will tell you which network it belongs to. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: ...!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi Career change search is on -- ask me for my resume