It took me an afternoon of reading the docs on Wikipedia and Zytrax to grasp the basics of both zone files and BIND config files, and another hour or three with

It took me an afternoon of reading the docs on Wikipedia and Zytrax to grasp the basics of both zone files and BIND config files, and another hour or three with the tunnelbroker.net "certification" tests to grasp stuff like glue records. That's... not a long time to invest for such a useful thing. Also, the only punctuation I see in a zone file is for comments, $KEYWORDS, the SOA record, and "@" to indicate that a record is meant to apply the $ORIGIN. Did I miss something? If you don't like "A", "CNAME", and "TTL", let me propose a preprocessor that lets you do the following: host1.example.com update-3600-secs ip4 1.1.1.1 host1.example.com update-12-hours ip6 2001::1 host2.example.com update-24-hours alias host1.example.com host1.example.com update-1-week physical-location 52 22 23.000 N 4 53 32.000 E -2.00m 0.00m 10000m 10m This format retains the greppability of the existing zone file format as well as its drive-by appendability, while allowing one to ease one's way into the actual zone file syntax that's being used by your DNS server.