

The weird and wonderful world of DNS LOC records - jgrahamc
http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-weird-and-wonderful-world-of-dns-loc-records

======
nly
It seems odd to me that someone back in '96 went to the hassle of implementing
DNS LOC but didn't explicitly specify which reference ellipsoid should be
used.  Nor does the protocol provide a mechanism, on a per-record basis, to
specify which ellipsoid has actually been used. 

~~~
yuubi
RFC1876 says WGS84 in several places, including one of the parts quoted in the
Cloudflare article.  I don't spot an explicit statement that lat/lon are WGS84
(only altitude, p. 3), but it's the only datum mentioned and assuming that alt
is WGS84 and lat/lon something else seems perverse. 

------
rbc
I'm really surprised that LOC records aren't being more heavily used.  If you
need to publicly publish position data, DNS gives you a worldwide distribution
method. 

~~~
wibblenut
The .tel TLD was established for the purpose of publishing contact/location
and other meta info at the DNS level, but it hasn't yet caught on
unfortunately. 

~~~
duskwuff
The lack of success of .tel is largely because Telnic has implemented the TLD
in such a way that it can _only_ be used to publish contact information -
every .tel domain must have its nameservers set to Telnic's DNS servers, which
in turn will only serve records pointing to Telnic's web servers, which will
only serve pages listing contact information. 

~~~
wibblenut
You're right, but had it not been so restrictive would people have used it for
its core purpose?  There are a bunch of other reasons it hasn't caught on.  But
at this stage I think their best move would be to ask ICANN whether they can
liberalise the extension.. I imagine the community would back it. 

~~~
duaneb
With that kind of attitude the internet would not exist. 

------
jessaustin
Should we interpret this as meaning that RRDNS _never_ correctly served LOC
records?  They did most of the work to implement this and then didn't test it
at all? 

~~~
mason55
My guess is they didn't test correctly.  They likely set up their tests to
check that the string being returned was the same as the string that was
stored without realizing that the value served was supposed to be transformed. 

------
dalek2point3
you can do a "location-based" google search, where it restricts pages based
just on the country of origin.  how does that work? 

~~~
nly
GeoIP databases, HTTP headers, HTML tags, TLDs, heuristics based on the
language and links from other sites...

