From: timk@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca (Tim Kuehn)
Subject: Re: Domain naming conventions
Organization: TDK Consulting Services
Date: Fri, 8 Jan 1993 00:23:58 GMT

> 003316g@dragon.acadiau.ca (Steve Gregory) writes:
>I'm still not too sure that the city name is even neccessary. I
>understand that some people would like to have a really good idea where
>their email is going. However, not all city names are that usefull. 

This depends on what you're trying to accomplish with this naming system. 
If you want to have an architecture that scales reasonably and distributes 
the DNS/MX load and growth of the net as additional users are added, 
you need some kind of naming scheme to facilitate this. If you don't have
this then you'll find yourself with a ad-hoc grown (and hence confusing to 
add to, and even harder to maintain) networking system.

>For example if the domain convention was 
>username@server.university.city.prov.ca my address would be 
>003316g@dragon.acadiau.WOLFVILLE.ns.ca. Now most
>people seeing this are still only going to know that I'm somewhere in N.S.
>Wolfville just dosen't fit up there with citys that everyone knows. For
>that matter a lot of Nova Scotians are hard pressed to tell you where it is.

Or your univeristy could go under .edu, in which case it would be:

003316g@dragon.acadiau.edu

which is much shorter. It's *not* written law that everybody in Canada 
*has* to be under .ca, including educational sites. If your addressing
or naming convention requirements would be better met under other 
toplevel domains, then you should look into that and not try to make 
.ca do things it's not really intended to do. 

Alternatively you could be cross-registered under both .edu and .ca, 
and public the more readily dealt-with name (.edu), and have the 
.ca domain be used for sites that determine addresses by geography.

>I do like the idea of including provinces in the domain name. Now
>not only would someone know that I'm in Canada, but those who really care
>will know that I'm in Nova Scotia. Also I feel that university and company
>names should be more or less spelled out, such as waterloo, mcgill,
>stmarys, an acadiau. 

For shorter names this is fine. But what happens on longer named sites? 
Or a large proliferation of sites? If we don't have naming rules on how 
sites/domains are generated, then you'll have people type point-la-prairie 
if they live in that area, which is a lot longer than a namge generated
by my proposal -- poinlaprair.

One of the things that we have to design into whatever naming convention 
is an ability to scale it up to a larger number of sites, and maybe even 
something that can be applied to individuals. If I have my way, that 
problem may soon to crop up here in KW, :-) and if a solution is not 
forthcoming from CA-DOM or can.domain, then I may have to impose a 
convention of my own here, and wherever my service happens to spread to.

 +-----------+-----------------------------------+---------------------------+
 | Tim Kuehn | TDK Consulting Services           | timk@tdkcs.waterloo.on.ca |
 | <><       | Ask me about news and mail in KW! | (519)-888-0766            |
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Newsgroups: can.domain