Re: The state of DNS support, was Deprecating SPF

Andrew Sullivan <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.ietf.dnsext
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On Sun, Aug 25, 2013 at 04:21:33PM -0700, David Conrad wrote:
> 
> I suspect this won't matter. People's minds are made up.

Actually, mine isn't.  That's an interesting example.  What would be
helpful to me is an understanding (and I really don't have any) of why
you think the analogy actually shows we ought to move to type-99
instead ot sticking with type-16.

As I understand the http/1.0 vs /1.1 trade-off, the 1.0 server
suffered latency disadvantages as opposed to 1.1.  Therefore, there
was an automatic incentive to support 1.1 as soon as possible, even if
no client supported it, because for any client that supported it there
was an automatic advantage in latency.  At the same time, there was an
incentive for every client to support 1.1, because if the server did
there was a latency advantage.  And because of the signalling
available by virtue of the header, http sessions could downgrade
without starting all over.  I'm completely prepared to be corrected on
any of this, since I wasn't involved and when it was an issue I was
only remotely involved in the effects (i.e. I was an http enthusiast
as someone who thought the web was cool, but I was a philosophy
student.  I thought smarter people than I would fix it, and they did).

The proposal in the SPF case doesn't seem to match this.  Because DNS
is connectionless, we don't have a way to downgrade depending on what
the querying agent says it can do.  The counter-examples -- DNAME and
DNSSEC are the obvious cases -- actually show what a big deal this
is.  So the transition strategy in this case involves every actor
either paying a cost up front with no direct benefit, or else a
strategy that prefers the pre-transition state with the desired state
a second-best alternative.  This seems like a significant difference
to me.  What did I miss?

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email protected]
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