3.3. Technical guidelines on use

Before the DNS can be used to hold naming information for some kind of object, two needs must be met:

• A convention for mapping between object names and domain names. This describes how information about an object is accessed.

• RR types and data formats for describing the object.

These rules can be quite simple or fairly complex. Very often, the designer must take into account existing formats and plan for upward compatibility for existing usage. Multiple mappings or levels of mapping may be required.

For hosts, the mapping depends on the existing syntax for host names which is a subset of the usual text representation for domain names, together with RR formats for describing host addresses, etc. Because we need a reliable inverse mapping from address to host name, a special mapping for addresses into the IN-ADDR.ARPA domain is also defined.

For mailboxes, the mapping is slightly more complex. The usual mail address <local-part>@<mail-domain> is mapped into a domain name by converting <local-part> into a single label (regardles of dots it contains), converting <mail-domain> into a domain name using the usual text format for domain names (dots denote label breaks), and concatenating the two to form a single domain name. Thus the mailbox HOSTMASTER@SRI-NIC.ARPA is represented as a domain name by HOSTMASTER.SRI-NIC.ARPA. An appreciation for the reasons behind this design also must take into account the scheme for mail exchanges [RFC- 974].

The typical user is not concerned with defining these rules, but should understand that they usually are the result of numerous compromises between desires for upward compatibility with old usage, interactions between different object definitions, and the inevitable urge to add new features when defining the rules. The way the DNS is used to support some object is often more crucial than the restrictions inherent in the DNS.