Subject: [ietf-provreg] Purpose of the drafts (was: Re: EPP domain:transfer)

From: Eric Brunner-Williams at a VSAT somewhere (or in Portland Maine) <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2005 15:43:12 -0400

> What's the purpose of this? Intellectual exercice? Standards are supposed
> to make life *simpler*. If you need a lot of work to fit
> your business rules into the standard, then it is not worth it.
> EPP is a bad standard because it is not possible, giving the variety of
> registration rules, to have a standard which is both standard (meaning reuse
> of software) and sufficient.

I hold myself as responsible for EPP as I hold Scott or anyone else.

There is a schema, not a DTD, for a ML - the W3C's XML -- that defines the
syntax of a data and control transport protocol. There were features we
considered, we agreed upon what we agreed upon, where "we" ment VGRS+NSI,
NS, AF, GNR, and RCOM, and not a lot else, and CNO registrars and {s|cc}TLD 
parties would have been helpful, but they self-excluded, and were excluded,
for better or worse.

Those who don't take the schema seriously self-inflict. NS did that, even
the IESG did that, and a bunch of {s|cc}TLD registries flirt with that.

The common source implementation model was tried. It failed for reasons
that are unsurprising.

Is uniformity at some level, from some universal broker service up to one
single registry and registrar (server, client) single-image pair, really
important? Probably not. Is proximality useful? Operationally, I think it
is.

You milage may vary, mine did,
Eric