Re: FYI: new draft of site-meta; now well-known

[Peter Koch <[e-mail]>]

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 01:38:32PM +1000, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> See:
>   http://bit.ly/48bdmV

                        Defining Well-Known URIs
                     draft-nottingham-site-meta-02

The IANA registration policy could benefit from a disambiguation.  Section
5.1 says "Designated Expert" with "Specification Required", but then says
"typically published in an RFC or Open Standard".  The threshold for
"Specification Required" is lower, so it's unclear to me whether the
additional clause is intended to provide guidance only or is meant to
be normative.  Later, 5.1.1 seems to imply that change control with all
specifications backed by an RFC lies with the IETF, which isn't
necessarily the case.

On the choice of the name:

   It's short, descriptive and according to search indices, not widely
   used.

It's descriptive in a certain language environment but at the same time
it's a protocol element that is likely exposed to end users. There's an
odd chance that helpful implementations will provide localizations (like
some do today for email header fields).  A tag like "/.---.-" (W and K
in Morse code) looks less nice, but might reduce the temptaion of
translation.

-Peter