morris@harvard.ARPA (Free Advice) (05/06/84)
What are the prospects on official words about top-level domains other than ARPA? Seems to me there is a conflict here. In order to make addresses absolute, all hosts have to know about all top-level domains. If more domains, eg BITNET, UUCP, etc., are officially added, then official recognition, if not permission, between the Arpanet and non-DDN nets is implied. If no domains at the level of ARPA are added, then the domain naming scheme is almost worthless. People on the arpanet don't need domains, since .ARPA is default and each host knows about every other one (not strictly true, but mosher%ucbarpa@Berkeley is absolute without being domain based). Addresses bound from the arpanet to nets which aren't subsets of the arpanet will either be absolute without being domain based (uucphost!user@Berkeley), or will be domain based but not absolute (user@host.BITNET works from here, but not from most arpanet hosts). Any ideas on how this may be resolved? Robert Morris, morris@harv-10.