All of the contact data on this website is fetched from DNS TXT records. It's an example of how NUM [0] data can be used.<p>A small team and I have created NUM because we believe that paid, restricted, rate-limited APIs provided by the giants of the web are holding back developers and we want to change that.<p>NUM provides: a simple way for businesses to provide machine-readable data direct to their users, bypassing data hoarding web giants; a forever free, unlimited and unrestricted source of data to developers.<p>The general-purpose semantic web has failed because the standards (microdata, JSON-LD, Open Graph) are too complicated and difficult for small businesses to adopt and often forgotten about by marketing teams in large businesses because data is too difficult to edit.<p>NUM is different because it can be adopted by any business using a simple online form. The protocol includes two DNS queries – the first to the authoritative DNS zone; the second failover query to our NUM Server, any business can claim their domain on NUM Server using a simple online process.<p>The Company Directory website linked to is just one example of how NUM data can be used. The website fetches all data from DNS using client-side Cloudflare DNS-over-HTTPS calls (see Network tab in Dev Tools). Barclays, or any other company listed can update the data on this site by adopting the NUM protocol [1] independently in their own DNS – for example, to replace the data for the Barclays listing, they can create a TXT record at 1._num.barclays.co.uk or claim the record shown by visiting numserver.com/claim/barclays.co.uk<p>DNS-based protocols like NUM (other examples are SPF and DMARC) typically suffer from the chicken-and-egg problem where no-one looks for this data in DNS because it's not there, and no one stores this data in DNS because no-one is looking for it.<p>To help overcome this, we've pre-populated the DNS with contact data for large UK companies and are in the process of automatically gathering contact data for all *.uk domain names (we expect to complete this in the next 10 days) before moving on to all other UK companies, then companies worldwide (the US, Canada, Australia next).<p>NUM can be adopted / edited with a simple online form. Anyone can create a record for their domain, either independently in their own DNS or using our service at <a href="https://app.numserver.com/tools/editor/add" rel="nofollow">https://app.numserver.com/tools/editor/add</a><p>To ensure that NUM is as efficient as possible, we store all data in DNS using MODL [2] – a compact, DNS-friendly data serialisation format; we make compact DNS objects developer friendly using Unpacker [3] – we have developed both in-house. I have written a very basic Notion document to explain how all of these technologies fit together [4].<p>To simplify all of this for front-end developers (who by and large don't care about DNS), we've packaged it up in a Typscript library called company-api which you can query for a domain and get a beautiful object back containing company contact data [5].<p>We are very keen for feedback, good or bad.<p>0. <a href="https://www.num.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.num.uk</a><p>1. <a href="https://www.numprotocol.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.numprotocol.com</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.modl.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.modl.uk</a><p>3. <a href="https://www.unpacker.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.unpacker.uk</a><p>4. <a href="https://www.notion.so/num/NUM-MODL-and-Unpacker-67d7cd59548d4eafb4852d0d89ff9493" rel="nofollow">https://www.notion.so/num/NUM-MODL-and-Unpacker-67d7cd59548d...</a><p>5. <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/company-api" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/company-api</a><p>Edit: to make it clearer what problem we're trying to solve.
I think you're leeching off someone else's infrastructure and using it to do things they never meant it to do. Sure, the technical capability is there, but your use case would drastically increase their costs. You are essentially cost-shifting your customers' costs onto theirs. Not cool.<p>It's like building a cloud storage solution off Gmail's free storage. It can be done, has been done, but that doesn't mean it's cool to do so.<p>Your system would increase costs for DNS providers all over the world, without their consent, just because you're using it as a loophole. It was a problem that wasn't there fixed in a way that leeches from rather than gives back to the community.
The idea I had for this over 10 years ago was to modify djb's dnstxt to output raw HTML with a MIME header. tinydns allows one to store arbitrary data so I could put anything in a 512-byte DNS packet, including "text/html" (newlines and carriage returns). I could request tiny web pages from tinydns. There have been other similar things by other folks like putting deCSS code in DNS, Wikipedia data, audio files, etc.<p>Now this might all sound silly, but since then 1. DNS packets are now massive and can carry much more data and 2. big companies are pushing a "next-gen" UDP-based protocol (reminds me of djb's CurveCP) for HTTP, serving HTML and other web junk. They also want to use this UDP-based protocol for other things, like DNS, eventually.<p>Whatever. HTML in DNS worked great. Tiny pages that fit in a CPU cache.
I don't get it.<p>You have to host the static page somewhere. Why not host the data in the same place (as a json blob or whatever)? It seems like the implication is all the data in dns is static, so what's the benefit of adding dns to the mix - you already have to use something else to host some of your static resources, why not just have a single static host instead of two separate static hosting systems?<p>(Yes in theory you could write a dns server to dynamically answer queries, but that doesn't seem like its what is being proposed here)<p>Dont get me wrong, its cool you can access dns from a browser, but i dont think this is a compelling usecase (something like web torrent in the browser with magnet links in dns for a decentralized web, seems like it would make a good demo for this technique)
Thank you for sharing your project, Elliott.<p>It is an intriguing technology, and a clever way of putting together existing pieces in a new way.<p>I think it is very much in the spirit of how things are done on the Internet, although I'm not entirely convinced that NUM wouldn't gum up the DNS system if widely adopted.<p>My question to you is, how would I take advantage of NUM as a small-time personal-website operator, if my website was largely about small text-file snippets?
>CompanyDirectory.UK is a NUM Technology [1]<p>>What is NUM?<p>>NUM is a DNS-based alternative to the World Wide Web for storing and retrieving structured data. The web is amazing but websites are built for browsing and are an inefficient way to find precise pieces of data like telephone numbers, bank details and more.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.num.uk" rel="nofollow">https://www.num.uk</a>
Sounds similar to Telnic<p><a href="https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-reid-dnsext-nkey-00" rel="nofollow">https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-reid-dnsext-nkey...</a><p><a href="https://icannwiki.org/TelNic" rel="nofollow">https://icannwiki.org/TelNic</a>
Please no.<p>CI systems like GitHub actions and CircleCI use to have unlimited CI minutes until people started abusing them for things they weren't intended for (i.e. crypto mining).<p>I would hate if I had to pay for DNS services (or be forced into using an ISP one which does things like blacklist certain domains) just because people on the internet wanted to be 'cool' and show off how smort they are.<p>This is why we can't have nice things.
In a cursory read through, I’m still not sure what problem NUM actually solves. It seems like it moves data storage into DNS TXT records and defines some parsers.<p>What benefits does NUM have over html over http? One can use some semantic html tags to organize the data for parsing, making it roughly equivalent to NUM modules. If a NUM client is running w/o a newly developed NUM module, how does it parse that data and how is it better than html without semantic meaning?
This is interesting. I run <a href="https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://newbusinessmonitor.co.uk/</a> and I’m often asked if I can provide contact data for UK companies, but this is difficult because no contact data is published when a company registers. I wonder how you’ll be getting this data for smaller companies.
If you are offering this to people for free, what is your company’s business model? Why centralize their info on a single domain instead of putting it on their own using a common format?