The principal advantage of such an approach is that it requires no change to most existing DNS servers. It is not intended to replace the process by which new resource records are defined and implemented. 2 Format of TXT record To store new types of information, the TXT record uses a structured format in its TXT-DATA field. The format consists of the attribute name followed by the value of the attribute. The attribute name is considered case-insensitive.
All subsequent characters are part of the value.
The attributes can be accessed by the standard resolver library, but it is recommended that a library routine designed specially for this attribute format be used. This routine would remove all quoting characters before returning the information to the caller. A more complex routine could return attributes with multiple values, or several different attributes. To permit ease of interoperability and to reduce the chance of naming conflicts, a registration process for well known attribute names might be established. This paper does not address attribute name registration.