Subject: support for IPv6 Canonical Text Representation draft

From: Ed Jankiewicz <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2009 14:41:42 +0200

I believe the rules are sufficient to make the representation 
unambiguous, but the clause "lower case preferred" leaves a small 
ambiguity, although most application search boxes can be set to don't 
care for case.

The reference to RFC 1924 was not intended to belittle this effort - I 
agree it is necessary and helpful.  Many truths are said in jest - while 
intended to be humorous, RFC 1924 did define a completely unambiguous 
representation of IPv6 addresses.  Apparently the lack of an efficient, 
unambiguous and human friendly representation was already recognized as 
enough of a problem in 1996 to inspire an April 1 RFC.

One concern I have is that as an informational RFC this will not have 
"the force of law" and it may be difficult to motivate universal 
implementation.  Would a standards track doc as an update to 4291 be 
completely out of the question?  i.e. just to modify the Text 
Representation sections (2.2 and 2.3).

Ed J.

also seems very significant that RFC 1924 is 4291 backwards....

-- 
Ed Jankiewicz - SRI International
Fort Monmouth Branch Office - IPv6 Research 
Supporting DISA Standards Engineering Branch
732-389-1003 or  [email-masked]