From: shields@tembel.org (Michael Shields)
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 1995 12:22:57 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: censored? corrected [Steve Pizzo cited in The Spotlight]
In-Reply-To: <9511061509.AA10512@mhv.net>
Message-ID: <47m051$236@yage.tembel.org>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


In article <9511061509.AA10512@mhv.net>,
Lynne L. Harrison <lharrison@mhv.net> wrote:
>   If, however, the growth continues with people, not only accessing the net,
> but getting domain names - doesn't it seem likely that, at some point, only
> IP addresses will be left (or dumb domain names like http://www.stkdlcp.com)?
>   Ergo, what is the problem with having a numerical URL?

Stability.  Originally DNS was just a handy user-friendly thing, but then
it because the primary way to name a host.  This allowed the IP address
to become irrelevant, which allows entire sites to be renumbered when the
network topology changes.  This is important to keep the routing tables
small (by minimizing the backwards-compatibility exceptions), which is
a critical problem today.  Thus all recent architectural decisions have
been away from direct use of IP addresses anywhere.

DNS zone table size is also a problem; solutions will probably be in the
form of new top-level domains.  You might be see http://fubarco.www or
http://www.ibm or http://www.fubarco.inc, but not http://10.5.23.10.

Neither routing table scaling nor DNS zone scaling is really on-topic;
if you're interested I'll give you some pointers in private mail.
-- 
Shields.