Subject: [weirds] Basis for BOF request for Taipei

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:19:18 -0400

Dear colleagues,

I'm attaching a proposed draft WG charter and a possible agenda for a
BOF in Taipei.  Some of you may recall that we had hoped after Quebec
to make greater progress than we have.  For my part, I have let down
my end of the log, due to some personal issues that cropped up at the
end of the Quebec IETF meeting.

The deadline for BOF requests is on Monday.  I already sent a note to
the Apps ADs warning them that a BOF request will be coming.  I'd like
to propose the following as an agenda, and the attached draft charter,
when I make the request.  Both of these are totally tentative,
however, and I'd appreciate feedback, additions, alterations, and
deletions.

Remember that the deadline for the BOF request is Monday.  These
documents don't need to be final when that request is made -- we can
continue work on the list here prior to the IETF meeting -- but I'd
like to be able to demonstrate engagement and activity.  Apart from
the activity we already see on the list, discussion about these two
administrative details will provide evidence of an engaged community
that will create an effective working group.  Therefore, the sooner
you can get your comments in, the better.

Best regards,

A

Proposed agenda (1 hour):

    0.  Agenda bashing.

    1.  A very quick review of the background.

    2.  A pointer to the drafts about actual deployments, but not                  discussion of these.                                                        
    3.  A very quick overview of the then-extant requirements draft.           

    4.  Questions for discussion (at least 30 mins):                                 
        a.  Is this a problem to be solved?                                     
        b.  Is the problem statement in the proposed charter clear                     enough?                                                                 
        c.  Do we think we can solve the problem?                               
        d.  Are there people willing to work on the problem?   

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Dave Piscitello <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:05:12 -0700

I think the charter reads well. I have a few comments:

"While there are parts of IRIS that have been widely deployed, as a
    replacement for WHOIS it has not been a success.  "

Not certain why we'd need to say more than 

"IRIS has not been a success as a replacement for WHOIS".

"The Working Group shall undertake to document the existing
    efforts, to determine the general needs of such a service; and to
    standardize a data format"

Does this mean the group will come up with a single data format? 

Last point. Is it worth mentioning anything about the problems ad hoc solutions to accommodate internationalized registration data using Whois create? Server specific signaling, widely varying response formats, and error reporting already inhibit legitimate automation. None of these scale well today and will only become worse. While I concede that it's not possible to suppress ad hoc efforts, providing a scalable solution offers a practical alternative.

On Sep 29, 2011, at 10:19 AM, Andrew Sullivan wrote:

> <wierds-charter-20110929a.txt>_______________________________________________
> weirds mailing list
> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/weirds

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 11:35:40 -0400

On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 08:05:12AM -0700, Dave Piscitello wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> 

That's ok with me.

> Does this mean the group will come up with a single data format? 

There's a later paragraph that suggests it might even be a wholly
different protocol.  I can see this needs more work, though, so I'll
see how I can stitch them together better.
 
> Last point. Is it worth mentioning anything about the problems ad hoc solutions to accommodate internationalized registration data using Whois create? Server specific signaling, widely varying resp…

Hrm.  Probably.  Suggested text?

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: "John Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Sep 2011 16:19:58 -0000

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
To: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [weirds] Basis for BOF request for Taipei
In-Reply-To: <[email-masked]>
Organization: 
Cc: [email-masked]
Bcc: johnl-sent
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>> Does this mean the group will come up with a single data format? 

I understood it to be a single metaformat or framework, e.g., everyone
might use the same tag/data format, although the dictionary of tags
would change by application.

>> Last point. Is it worth mentioning anything about the problems ad
>hoc solutions to accommodate internationalized registration data
>using Whois create?

Perhaps change point 1 to something like this:

  1.  Complete support for internationalization of queries and
    responses, including a standard representation for IDNs and
    non-ASCII text in queries and responses, and ways to indicate
    language preferences for responses.

It seems to me that the likely outcome there is use UTF-8 everywhere,
give or take some rules about when to use U-labels or A-labels.

R's,
John

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From: Andy Newton <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:32:02 +0000

Maybe this is being nitpicky...

>    2.  A pointer to the drafts about actual deployments, but not                  discussion of these.                     

Would this also include the newest draft by Arturo, Kaveh, and I?
That draft helps to answer the question about people willing to work on this.

-andy

---

From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:08:56 -0700

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of John Levine
> Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2011 9:20 AM
> To: [email-masked]

Ditto.

> give or take some rules about when to use U-labels or A-labels.

Works for me.

-MSK

---

From: "Murray S. Kucherawy" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:12:42 -0700

> From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
> Behalf Of Andrew Sullivan
> Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2011 7:19 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Subject: [weirds] Basis for BOF request for Taipei
> 
> BOF in Taipei.  [...]

Modulo my other comments to the list in a separate message, the charter looks like a decent starting point to me.

-MSK

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 14:20:18 -0400

> That draft helps to answer the question about people willing to work on this.

Yes.  The point is just that the BOF won't get into details of
proposals, but rather tackle whether we have a problem to solve &
whether we will.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Alessandro Vesely <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 20:59:54 +0200

> give or take some rules about when to use U-labels or A-labels.

Couldn't the "language preferences" be expressed in terms of charsets
as well?  I don't think we need to distinguish between en-UK and
en-US, albeit most of us would prefer ASCII over Greek if available.

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:09:03 -0400

> en-US, albeit most of us would prefer ASCII over Greek if available.

Perhaps "language or character set preferences for responses.  One of
the tasks of the WG will be to determine whether language, character
set, or both is the correct granularity to use."?

I'm currently doing some work for ICANN on their variant issues
project, and I have to say that this topic is an even bigger swamp
than I thought it was going in, so I do think some consideration is
going to be important here.  At bottom, though, we're going to want to
decide whether we want to use language tags or whether we just want to
indicate what script(s) we can handle.

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Dave Piscitello <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Sep 2011 12:21:47 -0700

>> Last point. Is it worth mentioning anything about the problems ad hoc solutions to accommodate internationalized registration data using Whois create? Server specific signaling, widely varying res…

I'll rephrase what I wrote:

Follow 

"A conspicuous problem with WHOIS is that it has never been internationalized. " 

with

"In the absence of formal specification, ad hoc solutions to signal internationalized registration data have and continue to be adopted to accommodate local language user needs. The current collection of Whois service specific signaling, widely varying response formats, and error reporting already inhibits legitimate automation. Dealing with internationalization in this manner does not scale well today and will only become worse. Providing a standards-base solution that scales well could minimize further proliferation of ad hoc solutions."

[That may be too wordy, feel free to modify]

---

From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 12:20:59 -0400

Dear colleagues,

> I'm attaching a proposed draft WG charter and a possible agenda for a

Here is a new draft charter based on the feedback from yesterday.  I
plan to use this in a BOF request I plan to make later today, unless
there are objections.

Thanks for the quick comments!

Best,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

---

From: Frank Ellermann <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:44:37 +0200

> It seems to me that the likely outcome there is use UTF-8
> everywhere, give or take some rules about when to use U-labels
> or A-labels.

Folks wanting "language negotiation" should use a Web interface,
HTTP supports this.  For WHOIS it would be an obscure hack, e.g.,
"add /e when talking with JPNIC, add -Tdn,ace when talking with
 DENIC, do something when talking with RIPE," etc. ad nauseam.

This just does not scale for the thousands of gTLDs presumably
starting next year.  Otherwise WHOIS i18n is as you said very
simple, just use NET UTF-8 (= RFC 5198), and let the servers
automatically handle A/U-label in queries and offer both forms
in responses.

IMO a WG Charter only needs a pointer to RFC 5198 wrt i18n, all
technical details are then almost obvious.

And the most convoluted i18n interface doesn't help me to get a
technical contact for say domain arbeitssocke.de abused in some
Amazon phishing if the response is like this:

% Error: 55000000002 Connection refused; access control limit exceeded

Needless to say that this was my first query today (= "this IP"),
and manually using the alternative Web interface with a captcha
and some "EULA" is excessively hostile to legit users.

-Frank

---

From: "John R. Levine" <[email-masked]>
Date: 30 Sep 2011 12:59:13 -0400

>>    language preferences for responses. ...
>
> HTTP supports this.

Good point.  If we do some REST-ish thing, it'd probably be fine to tell 
people to put their language tags in the http query.  If we do something 
else, extra hackery may be needed.  Either way, I think it would be a good 
idea to say that all responses must be in RFC 5198 network Unicode.

> % Error: 55000000002 Connection refused; access control limit exceeded

We all have the same problem, but it does not work for an RFC to say "you 
MUST return data that you don't want to return."

Regards,
John Levine, [email-masked], Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly