IPv6 address/port format

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Fri, 14 Jan 2000 12:34:27 -0500
    From:        Nathan Dorfman <nathan@rtfm.net>
    Message-ID:  <20000114123427.A18012@rtfm.net>

  | Bull. Network administrators will still have to deal with addresses.
  | They'd probably also prefer to be able to do this from the Unix shell
  | without a menagerie of backslashes and single quotes.

It is hard to believe that this ridiculous topic has come up again.

Address literals in IPv6 ought to be forbidden everywhere, except for
those applications which are configuring IPv6 addresses to interfaces
(and as that is generally done automatically, or by DHCP, that really
means for most cases, only in DHCP config files).

A much better solution for all other uses (all these network managers
who just have to use literal addresses) is to have the name to address
library routines (the things that call the resolver) have an "override"
switch (via an environment variable) that will allow the user to create
a file of domain name lookalikes, and associated IP addresses (perhaps
only in some locally defined bogus domain - or perhaps only with no dots
in the names at all), after which the library simply searches the file
for the name, and substitutes the address.   Then when someone who for
some exotic reason really does need to use a literal address, they just
add it to their file, with some shortname label as the domain name, then
just use the label in the URL (or any other place where a domain name
would work, but for whatever bizarre reason can't work).   This is easier
for the user faced with using a literal address (no strange syntax, no
weird quoting, and the address only needs to be typed once, no matter how
many times it has to be referenced) - and much better for applications
and systems, which no longer need to deal with this odd special case which
is almost neevr going to be used.

A side effect is that there's no way to embed a literal address in a web
page (or whatever) as there would be no way to get the literal out into
the user's file (other than requesting that it be typed in) - this is a
feature!

kre