Re: more on binary labels and longest match

["Michael A. Patton" <MAP@pobox.com>]

   From: "Matt Crawford" <crawdad@fnal.gov>
   Date: Mon, 06 Apr 1998 15:49:13 -0500

   Jerry:  I'm glad we have closue on the matter of 0/0.  I did have one
   commenter (by private mail, I think) request that even without 0/0
   allowed, he'd rather see N->N+1 as the interpretation of the count
   byte rather than N -> N ? N : 256.  Does anyone else feel that way?

Does anybody really see a need for 256 bit long labels?  I'd be
tempted to write this as "When N is 1-255 (inclusive), the label is
that many bits long, the value 0 is reserved for future use."  This
would make the computation simple, cover all realistic cases and leave
an opening for a special interpretation if we ever come up with one.
Note that since these are conceptually concatenated. longer strings of
bit field labels can always be represented.

   Sure, I can drop the longest match description and the notion
   of "binary ancestor" from binary-labels, no problem.  It will then
   become quite thin.  (Although a bit more exemplary material was
   requested and will be added.)

I expect you've already thought of this, but rather than just dropping
it, you should probably have a paragraph or so mentioning how LM might
be useful with bit labels.  And maybe you should include an example
that uses this.


As there are several drafts (including this one, and some that aren't
written, yet :-) depend on eDNS, we should probably concentrate on
finalizing that soonest, so it can get handed off as PS so others that
depend on it can make it to PS in reasonable time...

	-MAP