Re: Introducing draft-denog-v6ops-addresspartnaming

[Joel Jaeggli <joelja () bogus com>]

On 11/19/10 12:45 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 9:07 PM, Richard Hartmann
> <richih.mailinglist () gmail com> wrote:
> > as most of you are aware, there is no definite, canonical name for the
> > two bytes of IPv6 addresses between colons. This forces people to use
> > a description like I just did instead of a single, specific term.
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> I have an anti-naming proposal: Allow users to place the colons
> -anywhere- or even leave them out altogether without changing the
> semantics of the IPv6 address.
>
> The colons are there for readability purposes only. They have no
> special significance and should not be elevated to significance by
> naming the parts of the address they delineate. Treat them specially
> and some fools will attach importance to arranging tasks on two-byte
> boundaries.
>
> The meaningful boundaries in the protocol itself are nibble and /64.
> If you want socially significant boundaries, add /12, /32 and /48.

It is possible and desirable to be able to describe any mask length
between /0 and /128. the /64 is an important demarcation point for
subnets but everything shorter than that will appear in your routing table.

> Regards,
> Bill Herrin