[Standards] [Fwd: [Council] meeting minutes, 2008-11-05]

[Justin Karneges]

On Thursday 06 November 2008 20:52:32 Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
> It does seem that the single byte length indicators are included on the
> wire. 

Yep.  The confusion is really just around that text-based notation.  It's easy 
to get tricked into thinking that the rightmost field represents the raw 
bytes of the record, but it isn't anything of the sort.

For example, an A record's value is written as an IPv4 address in string 
format, but it is encoded on the wire as a 4-byte integer.  SRV has four 
fields, three of which are numbers (packed as 2-byte integers) and one that's 
a hostname (also not encoded in straight string format, but rather the in DNS 
label format).  TXT is a series of strings, which, not surprisingly, also 
ends up encoded in some special way.

-Justin