denoting IPv6 addresses and ports

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Thu, 15 Feb 2001 02:25:06 -1000 (HST)
    From:        Antonio Querubin <tony@lava.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.BSI.4.30.0102150140101.7263-100000@malasada.lava.net>

  | I suspect there's a fair number of folks working in the tech support field
  | who would disagree with you.

I understand the need - it is the solution I disagree with.   This is
just "we do it this way for IPv4, so let's also do it this way for
IPv6" mentality.

The right solution would be for the application name->address lookup
routine to be able to look up a locally defined name (like in a file)
as well as names in the DNS (essentially all implementations have this
functionality anyway).

Then, when the DNS isn't working, and you need to reach out to
the destination (as part of helping fix the problem with the DNS,
which should be the first thing to fix, but also for any other
reason), you just add the problem entry to your local file of
broken translations, and then use the name, the same way you
always would.   This works then for any and every application
under the sun, without needing to invent a hundred new ways to
imbed the IPv6 address literals in places where things like colons
were never intended to go.

It also prevents this local (if necessary sometimes) hack from ever
getting out and polluting the rest of the world - since this
temporary name/address translation only works on the system where
it has been manually added, there's no way to foist it on unsuspecting
others (which allowing an address literal to be embedded inside a URL
allows - the thing can then get parked in HTML docs all over the
planet, leading to the "we can't possibly renumber" scenario that
we have with IPv4).

kre