Overall Comment - there is a lot of illumination in here, but one overall point and a few smaller ones explain why I rated the draft Almost Ready, rather than Ready. The overall points is that it should give the reader more guidance. It is very clear early on, but as the topics become more complex, there is increasing use of terms before they are defined. Section 2's discussion of ASCII, presentation format and display format, is very complex, but reads much better if you first go read the definitions of the format types (and dip into IDNA). Sections 3 and 4 depend a lot on the term "owner" and there wasn't enough of a cue that this was a formal term to To help the reader use the document better, how about including a readers note at the end of the Introduction, pointing out that no ordering of the terms could be made to solve this, but noting the existence of the alphabetical index, a very unusual feature in IETF documents, I think. Transport Review Considerations I know it was discussed whether to include any terms related to DNS Stateful Operations. When this is revised again, pay attention to the very first sentence in the Intro, which will need tweaking for session-signaling. In contrast, in the EDNS definition in Section 5, I recommend tweaking the following to remove the word "potentially" because there already are multiple Proposed Standards for options that affect the handling of a DNS query. "and potentially to carry additional options that affect the handling of a DNS query" Would also suggest using this opportunity to clarify that EDNS is not end-to-end, because that is a source of confusion. Smaller Comments Section 1 Quoted sentence is not correct, because whatwg is not part of W3C (cf. https://whatwg.org/faq): "For example, the W3C defines "domain" at ." Fix by not including the example. If this is really where W3C goes for its definition of domain, change the sentence to read "the W3C uses as the source of its definition of domain" Section 2 Typo: missing words in definition of locally served DNS zone: "The context through which a locally served zone [missing words?] may be explicit, for example, as defined in [RFC6303], or implicit," Section 4 Typo: "it would have be" "Note that, because the definition in [RFC2308] is actually for a different concept than what was in [RFC1034], it would have be better if [RFC2308] had used a different name for that concept." Section 6 The Abstract and Section 6 use the term "successor" incompatibly. The Abstract uses it as a synonym for "obsoletes": "This document will be the successor to RFC 7719, and thus will obsolete RFC 7719." Section 6 uses it more in the sense of "updates" (unless I've missed something and RFC1035 has been obsoleted. "and sends responses using the DNS protocol defined in [RFC1035] and its successors." To my taste, not using the word in the Abstract would be a good fix for this. Section 9 Discussion of registry introduces "superior," a term not defined or used anywhere else. Fix this by replacing it with terminology that is defined, such as "superordinate" or adding "superior" to the section on "superordinate." "for some zones, the policies that determine what can go in the zone are decided by superior zones and not the registry operator."