RFC-236
by Darius Kazemi, August 24 2019
In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.
Programmers are lazy
RFC-236 is titled “Standard Host Names”. It's authored by Jon Postel of UCLA and dated September 27, 1971.
The technical content
Here's another entry in what is getting to be a long conversation about host names. In this RFC, Postel is issuing an update to his RFC-229. He recommends that individual sites be consulted before making any naming decisions about their site permanent.
Postel also says:
It has been brought to my attention that programmers are lazy and don't like to deal with character strings longer than one computer word or containing characters other than the capital letters A-Z or the digits 0-9. Thus, I have included an alternate list which is limited to 4 character names using only the alphanumerics.
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About me
I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm an independent technologist and artist. I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with ActivityPub, including a Node.js reference implementation, an RSS-to-ActivityPub converter, and a fork of Mastodon, called Hometown. You can support my work via my Patreon.