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Re: draft-eastlake-2606bis-00.txt: Suggestions for modifications
--On torsdag, oktober 20, 2005 21:17:34 +1000 Mark Andrews <Mark_Andrews@isc.org> wrote: 


2) A different conversation led to the (to me) surprising conclusion
that  there is no IETF document that conclusively states that top level
domains  shouldn't be all numeric. I think this is an appropriate thing
for the IETF  to state in a BCP, since 4-component all-numeric domain
names are hard to  tell from IP addresses - a technical consideration in
many protocols.


	RFC 1123 comes close.

           If a dotted-decimal number can be entered without such
           identifying delimiters, then a full syntactic check must be
           made, because a segment of a host domain name is now allowed
           to begin with a digit and could legally be entirely numeric
           (see Section 6.1.2.4).  However, a valid host name can never
           have the dotted-decimal form #.#.#.#, since at least the
           highest-level component label will be alphabetic.
Yep - but I'm betting that this will be ruled non-normative eventually, because some people want IDNs in TLDs, and Punycode uses numbers in its encoding. It's a long leap from "must be alphabetic" to "can be all-numeric" - but I'd prefer to have something explicit somewhere, so that we don't end up there by accident. 

I *think* it's uncontroversial. But better safe than sorry.




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