2007-11-14 2008-10-01 Standards Action Sometimes a host is not known to the domain name system and communication (and, in particular, communication to report and repair the error) is blocked. To bypass this barrier a special literal form of the address is allowed as an alternative to a domain name. For IPv4 addresses, this form uses four small decimal integers separated by dots and enclosed by brackets such as 123.255.37.2, which indicates an (IPv4) Internet Address in sequence-of-octets form. For IPv6 and other forms of addressing that might eventually be standardized, the form consists of a standardized "tag" that identifies the address syntax, a colon, and the address itself, in a format specified as part of the IPv6 standards 17. IPv6