
An interview with Paul Mockapetris, the creator of the DNS - wickwavy
https://www.welcometothejungle.com/en/collections/behind-the-code/coder-stories/articles/btc-interview-paul-mockapetris
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foobarian
This was my favorite Q & A:

> Tim Berners-Lee [inventor of the World Wide Web] and many others have called
> the design of the URL clumsy because we have host.domain—
> welcometothejungle.com—where it’s hierarchically going from lower to higher.
> And then we have the path component—/en/collections/behindthecode—which goes
> from higher to lower. We also use a mix of periods and slashes. So Berners-
> Lee proposed that domain/host/path—that is,
> com/welcometothejungle/en/collections/behindthecode—would be a better
> design. What are your feelings about that?

> I designed it this way for autocomplete. My vision at the time was that
> people would want to do autocomplete or they might want to just type part of
> the domain name and have it completed in a search list of the local
> environment. So it would not make sense to have the country code first. It
> had to be the least-significant part if you’re going to have any kind of
> reasonable search list or autocomplete. Imagine if we were to type “com.”
> and then wait for autocomplete. Out of 160 million choices, there would be a
> pretty long pull-down menu. So in the absence of any agreement or, in my
> view, cogent arguments about why the other way around made more sense, I did
> it that way.

This guy is my hero.

~~~
SkyMarshal
I wonder if he considered that even under a domain/host/path format, an
autocomplete could probably be designed to ignore the domain and search the
host.

Eg, if you're searching for
com/welcometothejungle/en/collections/behindthecode, just start typing
"welcometothejungle" and autocomplete will find that substring and return the
full URL.

~~~
waheoo
Solution in search of a problem.

Whats the issue with having the domain name, an essentially flat map from name
to number, going from least general to most general, and a path, representing
a file system tree, going from most general down its nodes to the most
specific?

Is the argument they make up two parts of a url, and thus should behave the
same way? Seems a bit superficial.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Yeah if your objective is differentiate between domain and file system path
then that’s one way of doing it. That might help with parse-ability,
especially if your protocol allows for an optional subdomain which may or not
be there, so having a clear separation b/t domain and path might be useful.
Hard to know without having been there when these decisions were being made.

------
myrandomcomment
So I have the pleasure of calling Paul a friend. One of the most interesting
and insightful things he has said in a conversation about the creation of DNS
to me was "if those above me had understood the importance of what we where
doing it would have never happened and the project would never have been given
to someone like me at my level at the time...". It is not clear he understood
it at the time himself. He is a pretty nice guy. I (a networking geek that
just took this cool stuff and built with it) cannot claim to have done
anything special on this journey to arrive where we are today, but I have been
privileged enough to know a few of the players and I can say everyone one of
them while having their own arrogance, it is never misplaced and in general
they just wanted to solve a problem and make stuff work better. I struggle to
see that level of idealism in today's tech crowd.

~~~
rlonn
> I (a networking geek that just took this cool stuff and built with it)
> cannot claim to have done anything special on this journey to arrive where
> we are today

> I struggle to see that level of idealism in today's tech crowd.

I wonder if these two are connected. The people I know who have accomplished
things are rarely those who look backwards or are quick to lose faith in
others, young or old.

Of course there is idealism out there. Tons of it. The eco system is just
seriously bigger now, and the money grabbers get most of the headlines so you
have to keep up and know where to look.

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lobster45
DNS is such an integral part of the Internet, when it stops working just about
everything breaks down

~~~
birdyrooster
And conversely it's more likely the culprit when things aren't working.

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tannhaeuser
I'd be interested to know what he thinks about DNS-over-http (and QUIC
absorbing everything TCP/IP in general if we let our browser cartel overlords
have their way)

------
bullen
I host a DNS server in each of the HTTP app. server processes in my global
hosting platform:

[http://host.binarytask.com](http://host.binarytask.com)

That way I can maintain and guarantee 100% read uptime!

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tptacek
Regarding DNSSEC adoption, for US names: it's less than 2%, just in terms of
raw signed domains. It's lower if you're looking at adoption among popular
domains.

~~~
axaxs
Source, as of 2020?

~~~
parliament32
Not sure where he's getting his numbers from, but check out: DNSSEC
validation, by country from APNIC
[https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec](https://stats.labs.apnic.net/dnssec)

~~~
tptacek
That's the number of _validations_ , which is effectively a measure of the
percentage of people using centralized resolver services that do DNSSEC
validation. The figure of merit is the number of signed zones, and, in
particular, the percentage of popular zones that are signed (you pick the
popularity metric; whatever you choose, the percentage will be extremely low,
unless it's "most popular schools and government agencies").

