Subject: [ietf-dkim] Nits with section 4 Detailed Description

From: Arvel Hathcock <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:33:48 -0500

Yet more suggestions:

4.1  DNS Representation

      "Sender Signing Practices records" -> "Sender Signing Practices 
Records" (assuming you agreed to the previous suggestion of making this 
an explicit definition change in 2.7).

       "Records not in compliance with that syntax or the syntax of 
individual tags described in Section 4.3 MUST be ignored"    This seems 
like you're saying two things:  First, records with overall syntactic 
problems (like SPF record put into SSP location) should be ignored.  
Second, that records with individual tags that are not syntactically 
correct result in the entire SSP record being ignored (rather than the 
specific tag in question being ignored).  Is this what you mean?

      "for purposes of message disposition,"  - I would just delete this 
bit as it's not necessary and could stur up the distaste some have with 
the entire question of SSP determining message disposition.

     "SSP records for a domain are published at a location...."  -  I 
keep forgetting where this is and trying to find it in the document is 
not as easy as it could be yet this is a major issue of practicality.  I 
think this is just my own stupidity coming into play but perhaps this 
point could be highlighted with a 4.1.1 and a title of like "SSP 
location in DNS" and maybe it should be put into 4.2 since that section 
is entitled "Publication of SSP Records".

4.2   Publication of SSP Records

     I see we have done away with the tree-walking completely which I 
think is great.

4.3  Record Syntax

    So, if I encountered an SSP record with dkim=foo this value is 
invalid and so the SSP contains a tag that is syntactically incorrect.  
This causes the rejection of the entire SSP record right?   If so, I 
think this should be made more clear because I missed it.  Is this what 
the text in 4.1 is saying?

  The descriptive text for "all", "strict", "process" should be indented 
some to aid readability.

    Non-Normative Rationale:  Strict may also be used by domains who 
simply don't want their domain spoofed.  Not sure if you want to say 
something about that or not.

   The section on "process" says that messages "SHOULD be processed by 
the verifier" - that's good because this is what got us the result of 
"process" in the first instance :P    

    Suggested rewrite: 
     
      process - Messages which are Suspicious from this domain SHOULD 
NOT be rejected although an SSP failure MAY be considered in subsequent 
evaluation of the message. 
 
     "intende" -> "intended"

  Suggested rewording of the t=y text:

    "The domain is testing Sender Signing Practices and the message 
SHOULD NOT be considered Suspicous based solely on it's results."

That's it from me for nits :)

Arvel

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