There's also Netscape's (?) email autodiscover mechanism with a .xml file served from there that describes how to do POP/IMAP/SMTP etc. However, despite /.wellknown/ being a bit of a standard, you'd be amazed at how many mechanisms you have to support to get autodiscover to work for all email clients. As it turns out SRV DNS records are also a bit of a standard for publishing pointers to services, and TXT records, and RANDOMLY_NAMED_RECORDS because updating your server n resolver to support another record type is such fun.
I actually think we are almost there now: DNS to find it and /.wellknown/ to describe it.
SRV records are extremely popular outside of the web. I really wish they would get more adoption. It's such a clean solution. We could have avoided the entire need for SNI if browsers supported service records.
I love SRV records but they are really just TXT with an API! PTR is A in a weirdly named domain ...
SNI avoidance is a weird one and you are probably right but SNI is only important (hah!) if you consider that we should all be using IPv6 by now and have billions of address per host to play with 8)
The rest of the world gets uptight about TLDs but there is one - relating to ENUM - that no one seems to mention and get upset about. If they did, instead of crapping on about whether Brazil or a US company owned "amazon" for example, then I'll give you (nearly) free telephone calls and a load of big Telcos will implode. Except they wont and the world will move on to the next logical step where all internet connections are no longer considered a sub-function of a telephone connection and the notion of a "leased line" is an anomaly.
Whoops, got carried away there. As you say - SRV should get more love.
