[dns-operations] creeping poorness of judgement

[John Levine]

In article <20200314225019.GM68408 at straasha.imrryr.org> you write:
>So my take is that applications that expect a single string per TXT
>record should just join without inserting spaces, while applications
>that expect multiple values can use the verbatim substrings without
>concatenation.

That sounds right.  I gather the reason that SPF and DKIM use a single
string rather than tokenized strings is that when they were developed
over a decade ago, a lot of DNS web provisioning crudware only handled
a single string per TXT record.

Meng told me that the reason he didn't use a prefixed name was that a
lot of the crudware couldn't handle names with underscores, either.
DKIM was a little later and the underscore situation was improved,
largely to SPF users complaining to their DNS providers.  It was still
a problem to publish keys longer than 1024 bits in a 255 byte string.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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