[apps-discuss] draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-00 and our lawn -- feedback?

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

I've been in an on-again, off-again discussion with some of the WEIRDS folks about their work and its relationship to <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-uri-get-off-my-lawn>.

That seemed to precipitate <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-weirds-bootstrap-00>, which describes a way to "bootstrap" a WEIRDS interaction, and I've been asked for feedback.

Reading through it, I have some issues, but I since uri-get-off-my-lawn is a product of this WG, not just my draft, I'd rather get a sense of what the WG thinks overall, rather than just giving my own feedback.

AIUI, the bootstrap draft uses a number of IANA registries to contain a mapping of (domain names, IPv4 networks, IPv6 networks, AS numbers) to URLs for their RDAP services. 

Those URLs are then used as base URIs for further interactions; for example, if example.com had a registry value of "http://example.com/lookup", you'd look up "foo.example.com" as "http://example.com/lookup/domain/foo.example.com".

To me, this seems better than the previous solution (where you assumed that example.com had something available at a certain path), but it still "bakes" URLs into the spec, relative to that base URI. I.e., the "/domain/whatever" bit above is locked into the spec and unchangeable, AIUI.

So, while they avoid collisions (probably), they still risk the other problems that the "get off my lawn" draft cautions against, AFAICT.

If I were doing this protocol and I still wanted to use a registry (questionable IMHO), I'd allow each entry to contain a set of URL templates, identified by link relations, that allows a one-step lookup without baking in any URLs. 

E.g., 

domain: example.com
    rel: domainlookup    href-template: http://example.com/lookup/{domain}

I'm very curious to hear what other APPS folks think about this -- especially those of a Web bent. We're trying to line up some conversations about this in London, and I'd like to inform them with the WG's perspective, rather than just my own.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/