I don’t see any issue on introducing the “_”
just like I don’t see any issue with $ and other currency symbols. Once decided it can be “locked” and that fear of never ending ASCII would stop.
I might be being cynical but it sounds like you might own some “-” hyphen ENS and want to protect yourself from the “_” version.
You are right with one things. Just the point of the iceberg know about ENS. And I can guarantee it unlike Web 2. This wont be as brand centred, quite the opposite in fact.
Underscores are permitted in DNS names - they are just prohibited by registrars for registration. The normalisation function needs to support a superset of valid DNS characters, so underscores need to be included.
First off, I’m assuming you mean domain names vs subdomains (as TLDs would be .com, .net, .org, .eth and so on)
I looked into this a while ago and the convention of not using underscores in domain names is from an incredibly outdated specification hailing from 1987 that was last updated in 1997 (the last spec is from 1998 but is about URI’s):
The TLDR is that it was decided that domain names should follow ARPANET hostname rules to prevent incompatibility with legacy software like telnet and mail before operating systems other than Plan9 conformed to unicode.
ENS doesn’t have to make those same considerations because it doesn’t support legacy software regardless. I haven’t seen any up to date specification that disallows underscores for any reason beyond this, let alone a reason that matters to ENS or modern software.
These same specifications also contains many antiquated rules restricting the length of names, internationalized names, all unicode and many more things we wouldn’t want to restrict ourselves to.
Those articles aren’t about which characters are valid in domain names, they are about rules for the issuance of SSL certificates by centralized Certificate Authorities.
ENS names aren’t required to point to a website, or to use SSL certificates, and self-issued certificates aren’t bound by those rules.
Totally agree ENS names are different, BUT it shows that underscores were used and revoked in the past in DNS to to the same reason why I am talking about not issuing the underscore in ENS
It’s history repeating itself, but as ENS is decentralised it can’t be revoked like on DNS, if it’s allowed it’s here to stay
No it doesn’t. Underscores not being allowed in domain names doesn’t have anything to do with those articles, it had to do with very old considerations for ARPANET hostnames. You can read about it in my comment here:
They are distinguishable by physical location on a mapped keyboard.
( i ) and ( l ) are seperate keystrokes.
( i ) or ( I ) is mapped the physical keycap ( i ) or ( I ) on most standard keyboard layouts
whereas the ( i ) keystroke will produce ( i ) or ( I ) and not ( l ) or ( L)
( l ) or ( L ) is mapped the physical keycap ( l ) or ( L ) on most standard keyboard layouts
whereas the ( l ) keystroke will produce ( l ) or ( L ) and not ( I ) or ( i )
( - ) and ( _ ) is mapped the physical keycap to the right of { [ 9 ][ ‘)’ ] } and to the left of { [ + ][=] }
which can produce both ( - ) and ( _ ), which is same keycap