The kind of "optimization" that Cloudflare is attempting to do here ... doesnt that transfer the burden of more expensive parsing downstream to all the DNS clients instead?

Sounds low key selfish / inconsiderate to me

... to push such a change without adequate thought or informed buy in by consumers of that service.

It's a pity they have to make an entirely new RFC, rather than amend the old RFC. Having independent RFCs and not a single unified "internet standard" under version control is a bit of a bummer in this manner.

I feel like they fucked it up then, when writing the post-mortem, went hunting for facts to retrospectively justify their previous decisions.

CloudFlare is a terrorist organization destroying the web.

It would make sure that any graph is provided in topological order.

Philosophers have agonized over this question since time immemorial.

Have you guys use Vercel + Cloudflare?

TL;DR everyone implemented RFC properly (if missing some defensive coding), cloudflare decided it's optional and then learned that everyone did implement RFC properly, just some also did some additional work to make sure servers made wrong still were supported

EDIT: Why the drive-by downvotes? If someone thinks I'm wrong, I'm happy to hear why.

> One such implementation that broke is the getaddrinfo function in glibc, which is commonly used on Linux for DNS resolution.

> Most DNS clients don’t have this issue.

The most widespread implementation on the most widespread server operating system has the issue. I'm skeptical of what the author means by "Most DNS clients."

Also, what is the point of deploying to test if you aren't going to test against extremely common scenarios (like getaddrinfo)?

> To prevent any future incidents or confusion, we have written a proposal in the form of an Internet-Draft to be discussed at the IETF. If consensus is reached...

Pretty sure both Hyrum's Law and Postel's Law have reached the point of consensus.

Being conservative in what you emit means following the spec's most conservative interpretation, even if you think the way it's worded gives you some wiggle room. And the fact that your previous implementation did it that way for a decade means people have come to rely on it.