Re: [art] Against BCP 190

[Adam Roach <[e-mail]>]

On 7/23/19 12:06, Leif Johansson wrote:
>
> On 2019-07-23 17:46, Adam Roach wrote:
>> On 7/23/19 11:28, Leif Johansson wrote:
>>> I am having trouble articulating the sense of unease I am feeling
>>> over this issue...
>>>
>>> The best I can muster right now is this: Reading section 2.3 of BCP190
>>> I see nothing whatsoever that speaks to the interoperability concerns
>>> that motivate the normative language in that (or for that matter any
>>> other) section of BCP190.
>>
>> The purpose of BCP 190 has never been to provide advantages to protocol
>> designers. That is, in fact, the opposite of its purpose. The purpose of
>> BCP 190 is to provide protections to the URI namespace and the people
>> who own its governance (e.g., domain owners) against protocol designers.
>> It's effectively a restatement of the well-understood principle of
>> "don't squat on protocol codepoints," but spelled out in terms of URIs.
>>  From that perspective, it is always going to be vaguely adversarial to
>> protocol developers, in the same way that IANA registration policies
>> more strict than "First Come First Served" are: its job is to protect a
>> common resource against having parts of the URI namespace carved off for
>> the exclusive use of one protocol or another.
> In that case maybe this is just a matter of qualifying section 2.3 with
> something along the lines of "this does not apply if your entire domain
> is meant to do just one thing"


You're not the only person to suggest that, and maybe it's worth 
considering.

However.

As I've mentioned up-thread, the TRANS conversation has indicated that 
these origins are *not* single-purpose, so this proposal is somewhat 
unrelated.

I'd like to see the conversation around single-purpose origins happen, 
if we decide to revise BCP 190. But it would appear that the TRANS folks 
are in a hurry to reach a conclusion regarding their specific use case, 
so perhaps we should focus the discussion on that.

/a