Subject: [Tzdist] Comments on draft-ietf-tzdist-service-00 Section 5

From: Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2014 23:08:25 -0700

A.  draft-ietf-tzdist-service-00 Section 5 often mentions "year" without 
defining the term, and this could lead to issues with years far in the 
past or future.  To fix this I propose adding the following definition 
to the glossary in Section 1.2:

Year: A Gregorian calendar year identified by an integer.  The calendar 
is proleptic: that is, it extends backward and forward indefinitely, and 
is not limited to time stamps after the first use of the Gregorian 
calendar in 1582, or to time stamps before the present.  Year 0 precedes 
year 1, year -1 precedes year 0, and so forth.

B.  Section 5 could use a brief intro, with an example request to give 
context to first-time readers.  (Sorry, I got lost.)

C.  Section 5 should mention the issue of character encoding.  New 
protocols are supposed to use UTF-8, and it doesn't hurt to remind 
people.  I suggest adding the following near the start of Section 5: 
"Request-URIs MUST represent text data as percent-encoded UTF-8 [RFC3986]."

D.  Section 5.9 needs rethinking, as discussed in Ticket #15 and the 
ensuing email discussion, e.g., 
<http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tzdist/current/msg00278.html>.