On Nov 25, 2008, at 20:01, Alex Bligh wrote:
but I don't see how an "application can interpret" the contents of a ZI recordany more than it can a TXT record.
This is true. However with a new RRtype, these messages can at least be separated from whatever TXT record gunk is already in use. BTW, there are no semantics here for applications to interpret: if they lookup an NINFO record, they just present it/them to the end user.
one could at least distinguish fooco's app "out of office" by something like:_outofoffice._fooco_com.jim.example.com 3600 IN NINFO "ABC123: Jim is out of the office until 3pm"(and letting the underscore translation from fooco.com act as the sufficient guarantee of uniqueness). On the other hand, perhaps even this could be done with a TXT record equally well.
And both would rely on clients having a priori knowledge of which string to prepend to the name to get a status message for a particular purpose. Or would force clients to enumerate all possible prefix combinations in order to find out which one, if any, has the flavour- of-the-moment NINFO record. Which can't work.
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