The RFC is pretty readable, but the tldr is that DNS is more strongly typed than that. It's not just a string-lookup service. There's a wire format for names, w

The RFC is pretty readable, but the tldr is that DNS is more strongly typed than that. It's not just a string-lookup service. There's a wire format for names, which some records carry; there are wire formats for v4 and v6 addresses, which other records carry, but in no situation do the strings "foo.example.com" or "10.1.0.1" actually go over the network when doing a DNS resolution.