As specified on most sites, Class D IP adresses for instance, range from 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. So their respective Subnet mask should be 255.0.0.0 right? If you look it up, that is not the case, it is stated that D and E have no subnet masks at all. Why is that?
Same goes for class E adresses. I know they have (virtually) no practical use, but that does not influence the adress space for hosts.
One sites states: Unlike Classes A, B, and C, Class D is not available for use in normal networking operations. They don’t have subnet potential because there are no host bits within the Class D address space.
But I do not understand how there can be none if effectively there are? In the same way I do not understand the following quote:
In multicasting data is not destined for a particular host, that is why there is no need to extract host address from the IP address, and Class D does not have any subnet mask.
In multicasting it is destined to a particular group of hosts I reckon, it's not a broadcast after all. And from which IP address should a host adress be extracted? And which host adress, the one of the destination hosts?
Is there a way of explaining this without getting into multicast routing and classful routing which is obsolete anyway, as the principle should also apply to IP routing?
Here some example posts explaining it I quoted:
https://www.n-able.com/blog/overview-of-subnet-classes
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/ipv4/ipv4_address_classes.htm
