[ietf-dkim] Escaping things in key/ADSP records

[Bill.Oxley at cox.com]

Is there any chance that this is an OS inspired edit? Perhaps the web
front end has a built in escape clause

-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-dkim-bounces at mipassoc.org
[mailto:ietf-dkim-bounces at mipassoc.org] On Behalf Of Olivier MJ
Crepin-Leblond
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 4:22 AM
To: John Levine; ietf-dkim at mipassoc.org
Cc: msk at sendmail.com
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Escaping things in key/ADSP records

+1

Many ISPs do not input records directly into the zone files. Their front
end is often a
web-based interface and get pre-processed by a system checking validity
before being
updated in the zone file automatically using script(s).
My ISP (as in, I am a client of theirs), one of the largest in the US,
had to migrate my
domain to their new nameservers because the legacy ones could not cope
with the ; and the
underscore (_). Thankfully I took this up with them early enough for the
new nameservers
to have a front end allowing those characters, but it looks like they've
used the
backslash...

Aside from the aesthetics of the record, does the escape affect
functionality?

Olivier

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
To: <ietf-dkim at mipassoc.org>
Cc: <msk at sendmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2008 12:52 AM
Subject: Re: [ietf-dkim] Escaping things in key/ADSP records


> >DNS TXT records can contain multiple strings which we just
concatenate to
> >form a complete key record.  That part's easily managed.  However
some
> >people have taken it upon themselves to escape semi-colons for some
> >reason, presumably because some programs like "dig" do that in their
> >output, which in turn is done perhaps to disambiguate a literal
semi-colon
> >with one that starts a comment in a zone file.
>
> I find it hard to see this as anything other than a bug in whatever
> scripts they're using to create their DNS records.  The DNS has counts
> for all variable length fields, so there's never a need to escape
> anything in the bits on the wire.
>
> R's,
> John
> _______________________________________________
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