[erydo]

At first I agreed with you, but realized that my preferred solution was essentially what they recommended and just with different wording. My thought process was:

  - Absolutely, DNS resolvers should not care or have knowledge of the protocol that will be used to access that address.
  - What they *should* do is just say that normal DNS resolvers shouldn't ever resolve .onion addresses.
  - (And then Tor should include a special DNS resolver that does anyway.)
  - Oh, that's compatible with what they said.

I think some of the confusion comes from their use of "applications".

[Ajedi32]

The problem is that

> Tor should include a special DNS resolver that does anyway

Would be pointless, given that the spec says:

> Applications that do not implement the Tor protocol SHOULD generate an error upon the use of .onion and SHOULD NOT perform a DNS lookup.

So according to this spec, even if you did implement a special DNS resolver, only TOR-aware applications would be able to use it, and that's pointless since TOR-aware applications can connect to `.onion` services without using DNS at all.

[sp332]

It says the DNS lookup should not be performed.