From: woods@robohack.UUCP (Greg A. Woods)
Subject: Re: Geographic Naming Conventions Considered Harmful
Organization: Elegant Communications Inc.
Summary: names are names, not addresses!!!!
Date: Sat, 9 Jan 93 18:51:01 GMT

In article <386@unbc.edu> lyndon@unbc.edu (Lyndon Nerenberg) writes:
> >[earler I wrote:]
> > The situation would be different if municipalities maintained MANs (Municipal 
> > Area Network) connected by WANs (Wide Area Network) run by the provincial
> > governments which were all connected to a federal government run backbone.
> > In this scenario there are valid reasons to enforce naming conventions which
> > follow the network topology.  Even in this case it is an issue of easing the
> > administration of the network.
> 
> No it isn't. The purpose of domain names is to isolate logical
> entities from the underlying network topology. If the above was
> true we would all just use IP addresses. (And in the US, a persons phone
> number would change when they switched carriers.)

Ah, sorry, I don't follow... What isn't?  The situation (i.e. the
acceptability of geographical [sub]domain names or the fact that even
in the case I described, it would remain *only* an admin. issue?

I agree that the domain names may isolate logical entities from the
underlying network topology, but that doesn't mean network
administrators wish to isolate the naming topology from the network
topology.  Just look at the topologies of CA*net and CA-DOM as an
immediate counter-example.

If we keep with the analogy of telephone number being the equivalent
of IP numbers, and names being equivalent to the RHS of a mailbox
(i.e. the FQDN), I'd like to make the following observation.

As communities grow, people seem to move from memorizing telephone
numbers; to using the telephone books to look up numbers by proper
name (and get annoyed when arbitrary regional classifications place
names in unexpected parts of the phone book); to also having to use
street names in addition to proper names; to finally using private
lists and directory services, or even short term "lists" (i.e. ask
people for their phone numbers and only keep the note recording it
until they've made use of it once).

The final series of behaviours always used to surprise me -- I know so
few people who use the telephone book in large cities.  In particular,
with phone books being distributed physical resources, ignoring them
as a resource (perhaps because looking up a number in a 2000 page
phone book is a bit time consuming!) seems like a terrible waste.

I'm not sure what this means w.r.t. cyberspace, except to imply that
we should think hard about naming, and try to make some changes to the
better, since indeed we may very well be on the doorstep to changing
the way society in general deals with proper names.

Let's not get stuck in a rut by defining our current naming scheme
based upon expectations of future impact on current naming services.
If past history offers any suggestion, I'm sure we should realize that
current technology will only be here for the short term.
-- 
						Greg A. Woods

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