Literal addresses in URLs - 'splain to me

Brian E Carpenter brian@hursley.ibm.com
Fri, 17 Oct 1997 10:30:14 +0100


That was certainly my view when drafting RFC 1900 and in the
ideal world I would stick to it.

However the fact is that when there is a catastrophic operational
problem with DNS, there can be cases where the *only* way to
repair the network is by using literal addresses, either to
send mail to another site, or to access remote systems -
and URLs are one of the ways we access remote systems these days.
So while I stick to the deprecation of literal addresses that is
in RFC 1900, I regretfully feel that we need them as emergency backup.

That means the syntax doesn't have to be beautiful.

  Brian Carpenter

>- bound@zk3.dec.com said:
> 
> 
> >I would like someone to explain to me exactly why disallowing literal
> >addresses in IPv6 URLs should not be allowed.  (Kind of a double negative,
> >sorry.)  I mean, I'm advocating that we bar them from URLs and nothing
> >else.  Typing "ping aaaa:bbbb::cc:d" from a console or anything is just
> >fine, but why work so hard to find a way to use them as URLs?  I'm just not
> >seeing it ...
> 
> I agree outlaw them for IPv6.  This is very intelligent input.    
> 
> /jim
>