Subject: [EAI] Minutes from our Vancouver meeting

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:30:26 +0100

Attached are the preliminary minutes from the Vancouver meeting. Please 
send corrections to the list.

Thanks a lot to Don Eastlake for recording these!

I have also uploaded the minutes + the agenda slides to the meeting 
materials server. Please inspect and comment!

                Harald

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From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:08:46 +0100

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
 
> Please inspect and comment!

I'm not aware of major controversies about net-utf8,
only minor issues wrt HT, FF, NEL, and maybe one or
two other characters.  What was John talking about ?

The reolution to reference his draft is good.  BTW,
the "unicode escapes" were approved some days ago,
that RFC could (should ?) be referenced in EAI-DSN.

| *** Resolution: Internationalization of Mailto: is
| within scope, because it is a requirement for the
| List-headers work.

Interesting.  I kind of hoped that mailto-bis would
be limited to fix mailto (for 3986, automagically
also 3987).  With 2822upd entering the picture that
is not more as "impossible" as it used to be.  But 
I still think that mailto-I18N should be a second
(experimental) step after mailto-bis (PS) is ready.

| Perhaps near the end of 2008, we can look at
| whether we want to push this onto the Standards
| Track.

No need to push and rush.  For 4408 the number of 
real (not just me ;-) complaints that experimental
isn't good enough for anything serious was limited.
Creating a test suite and collecting errata needs
some time, less than a year might be too short.

Happy holidays,

 Frank

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 12:45:25 -0500

> two other characters.  What was John talking about ?

I consider the recurring controversy (if that is the right term)
about NEL / CRLF to be quite a major issue, actually.

   john

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From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 22:38:07 +0100

John C Klensin wrote:

> I consider the recurring controversy (if that is the
> right term) about NEL / CRLF to be quite a major issue,
> actually.

Protocols based on XML or similar formats not depending
on a concept for "line" aren't affected by net-utf8, it
is for telnet and derived protocols, where a "line" is
an essential idea, consequently CRLF is also essential.

Nobody needs NEL in say whois, and if I'd want IRIS I'd
know where to find it (certainly not in net-utf-8 ;-)

I could quibble about HT not being as evil as net-utf8
claims, but that's really a minor issue:  SMTP, netnews,
EAI, etc. aren't supposed to drop the "W" in WSP only
because net-utf8 recommends to avoid HT.

 Frank

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:14:34 -0800

> Nobody needs NEL in say whois ...

Frank, the spec for whois doesn't leave a lot to the imagination.

---

From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2007 23:44:37 +0100

> Frank, the spec for whois doesn't leave a lot to the imagination.

At some point in time "we" need a better emulation of RFC 954 than
(1032 + 3912), and net-utf8 is the missing piece of this puzzle ;-)

The "we" might be RFCI (rfc-ignorant.org), or any folks interested
in IDN.  For now email addresses in whois databases won't be EAI
addresses, same issue as for SoA, Netnews, etc.  

 Frank

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From: Harald Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 23 Dec 2007 06:19:23 +0100

> (experimental) step after mailto-bis (PS) is ready.
That is also my impression; Martin hasn't indicated that he wants to
take on the EAI work at the same time as the rest of what he's doing. So
if mailto-bis rolls out (giving us a stable platform) without EAI
extensions, we can take it from there (I think).

                     Harald

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From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:29:47 -0500

--On Saturday, 22 December, 2007 23:44 +0100 Frank Ellermann
<[email-masked]> wrote:

> At some point in time "we" need a better emulation of RFC 954
> than (1032 + 3912), and net-utf8 is the missing piece of this
> puzzle ;-)

Hmm.  While I believe that, given its origins, RFC 954 was
solidly tied to NVT and hence ASCII-in and ASCII-out, the author
of 3912 deliberately or accidentally left that vague.  I assume
she did that one that sincere assumption that, given the many
problems that develop when Whois is compared to today's
expectations of it, it would be largely historic by now,
presumably replaced by IRIS.

I can't speak for Leslie, but I believe that replacement is the
right outcome and that patching the Whois spec wouldn't
accomplish a lot at this point, especially since at least one
major registry has made it fairly clear that they would ignore
any such patch if it ran counter to their current creative
reading of the spec.

In any event, introducing a discussion of Whois into the EAI
discussion doesn't seem to help move anything --either a Whois
revision, or the net-utf8 doc, or the EAI work itself-- forward.
I should have a new version of the net-utf8 spec posted within
the next 24 hours and assume that one will go to IETF Last Call.
Once that process completes (if it does), if someone wants to
try updating 3912, or convincing the author of 3912 to do so, I
will wish you well.  But, please, not on the EAI list.

> The "we" might be RFCI (rfc-ignorant.org), or any folks
> interested in IDN.  For now email addresses in whois databases
> won't be EAI addresses, same issue as for SoA, Netnews, etc.  

Yep.

And, if you want a personal opinion, it would be unwise to
change most of those contexts until after the EAI work is on the
standards track (assuming that happens).   Even then, I would
hope that ICANN and/or the relevant registries would give much
more careful consideration to the implications of addresses that
cannot be read, and may or may not be able to be copied and
pasted, than I think I have seen so far.

     john

---

From: Eric Brunner-Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 22:20:50 -0800

> pasted, than I think I have seen so far.
I've tried to kill this beast, viz 
http://www.imc.org/ietf-whois/mail-archive/msg00218.html,
however Bob Braden opined that without whois:43 the world would ... 
well, authoritative
things were writ from an ISC address in Marina del Rey to someone 
obviously lacking any
clue, and the 3912 draft was so much more ... I still don't know.

Then there was http://www3.ietf.org/proceedings/01aug/51-40.htm, but no 
consensus.

The 954 spec was:

  C: [::printable::]\r\n
  S: .*\r\n <socket close>

Cheers,
Eric

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From: "Frank Ellermann" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2007 23:54:42 +0100

> http://www.imc.org/ietf-whois/mail-archive/msg00218.html,

Blasphemous.  "ENOPRIVACY" cannot shock Google users, I'm
anyway not interested in phone numbers and other private
data of folks (registrants) who can't fix "it" (whatever),
the important data is AdminC / TechC, and the date of the
registration (fresh domains are suspicious).

> however Bob Braden opined that without whois:43 the world

Good, 0:1 in the IETF vs. Internet games.  IRIS might be a
good idea for registries and registrars, but not for users.

> the 3912 draft was so much more ... I still don't know.

Fortunately "they" missed RFC 1032 in their quest to make
the Internet worse ;-)  As long as whois.iana.org exists and
ICANN follows the rules (their interpretation of RFC 1591)
all is fine.  Adding a public whois-frontend to IRIS should
be simple.  RFC 3912 and John's new unicode-escapes RFC can
already send Unicode replies as ASCII, picking hex. NCRs is
possible and probably the best solution for IRIS frontends
(XML supports hex. NCRs), all that's missing is an RFC 2277
whois-upgrade based on net-utf8 for UTF-8 queries.

 Frank
-- 
http://idn.icann.org/IDNAbis#RFCs_and_Drafts_related_to_Whois