Subject: [Uri-review] Request for a review

From: Ted Hardie <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:54:51 -0700

Howdy,
	This is a request for the list to review a draft that has been discussed
in the p2psip working group but is not a product of the group. The
draft title is "Pointers for Peer-to-Peer Overlay Networks, Nodes, or Resources"
and it can be retrieved from http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hardie-p2psip-p2p-pointers-01 .  It proposes two different URI schemes:  "overlay" and "overlay-node". 
The  schemes are intended for provisional, rather than permanent, registration
to allow for some continued evolution, but we would like to ask for
review now.  It is our intent to ask that the I-D be published as an
informational RFC to provide stable documentation.
	Any comments welcome; my co-author and I will also both
be in Stockholm, if you would like to corner us for discussion there.
			regards,
				Ted

---

From: Bjoern Hoehrmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:29:42 +0200

* Ted Hardie wrote:
>http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-hardie-p2psip-p2p-pointers-01

At a glance:

I think the sections containing the filled-out templates are poorly
named (the word template, the indefinite articles, and the reference
to "URI" rather than "URI scheme"); something like "The 'name' re-
source identifier scheme" would be better.

There are formatting problems in the ABNF grammars like in 

  [";"" context=" overlay-context-uri]

Which probably is supposed to be

  [";context=" overlay-context-uri]

Or the missing spaces in

  service="service=" *1ALPHANUM

In section 5.1 I do not understand

  ;reg-name is defined in RFC 3986- nb limitation from host

I imagine nb stands for nota bene, but not what exactly I should
note, or what the reasoning for whatever there is to note is.

Instead of using a duplicated comment, it would be better to define
the `token` non-terminal with a prose value, like

  token = <A registered Peer to Peer Overlay Network type token>

Please note that ABNF literals are case-insensitive, so "otype="
is the same as "oTYPe="; it is unclear if that is intended.

The examples

   overlay-node://22301203/;context="overlay://enrollment.example.org/\
   ;otype=pastry"?resource=example.iso

   overlay-node:///;context="overlay://introducer.example.org/;otype\
   =pastry"?resource=iana.ICE

appear to be malformed, you cannot use '"' in URIs.

I do not believe the filled out templates are ever published standalone
through regular means; so I find it preferable if the document would not
reference itself like in the comment for the overlay-URI reference.

The ABNF for overlay-node includes ["#"fragment]. This is incorrect, the
document can only define the scheme-specific syntax which cannot include
a fragment identifier.

There appears to be a structural problem with the grammar in that it
uses rules like `service` which do not allow percent-encoding. I am
unsure of the implications.

The document probably fails to meet 2.6 of RFC 4395 as there is no dis-
cussion internationalization issues (I take it the query part allows for
more or less free form text).

Regarding "The authority section contains a node-id", this should
probably be "component" or some such, and given this text it might be
nice if the grammar actually had a 'node-id' non-terminal.

regards,
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:[email-masked] · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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