[dns-operations] Monday rant againt the uses of the Public Suffix List

[Jim Reid]

On 21 Jan 2013, at 11:54, Stephane Bortzmeyer <bortzmeyer at nic.fr> wrote:

> And 95 % of these uses are bad ideas: it creates false positives
> (.CW...) and false negatives (it's not because .COM exists that
> anything.com has a meaning).

Indeed. FWIW I stopped despairing years ago about the bad and/or downright stupid ideas that found their way into web-land. My standard rant about the ~10M lines of C lurking behind MySQL and PHP to support Wordpress can be inserted here.

Telnic was forced to implement a web proxy for the .tel TLD. [The idea behind .tel if anyone remembers or cares was it would only contain NAPTR records and DNS metadata.] The proxy would handle an incoming HTTP connection, do a NAPTR lookup and return a prettily formatted web page. Without this proxy, a browser looking up whatever.tel would have got back NOHOST because there would have been no A or AAAA records for that name. At which point the browser would present a page with the results of feeding "whatever" and "tel" to google. Which would have been delightful.