[TheNewsIsHere]

Aren’t all of those concerns out of scope for DNS itself, though? DNS can only give you a TTL, for example, it cannot require you follow it.

Ideally that’s what RFCs are for, but even organizations that pay smart people to come up with clever standards don’t always follow them. Implementations frequently disregard or guess about the things standards cover.

[tikhonj]

From the point of view of the standard, maybe, but not from the point of view of somebody learning or using DNS.

[TheNewsIsHere]

I don’t disagree, and I think that’s why we need to make it clear that there’s a difference between implementation and standard.

My education is a mix of formal and autodidactic. One of the best things I got from formal education is the structured introduction to fundamentals like the OSI model.

If you don’t have that kind of foundation, it can be much, much harder to understand the “why” of the endless differences between documented standards and in-the-wild implementations. It’s good to know where you are in the stack to help inform what you’re seeing.