Protocol Action: 'WebFinger' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-18.txt)

[The IESG <[e-mail]>]

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'WebFinger'
  (draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-18.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Applications Area Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger/




Technical Summary

This specification defines the WebFinger protocol, which can be
used to discover information about people or other entities on
the Internet using standard HTTP methods. WebFinger discovers
information for a URI that might not be usable as a locator
otherwise, such as account or email URIs.

Review and Consensus

The "WebFinger" draft has been discussed extensively within the
APPSAwg during the last year, it become a wg item in August 2012.
 Actually at some point the mail traffic generated by the
discussion was so high that it was agreed to move the discussion
to a dedicated mailing list ([e-mail]).

The only significant point difficult to agree on has been about
"whether WebFinger MUST support HTTPS only or instead it should
be allowed for WebFinger  fallback from HTTPS to HTTP". That was
resolved with a consensus call that generated a strong rough
consensus for HTTPS only.

The draft has been also extensively reviewed during the APPSAwg
Last Call. A lot of editorial issues, text clarifications have
been raised; all of them are now addressed in the current version
of the draft. During the wglc process it has been also agreed to
define a new  media type for WebFinger.

There are several open source WebFinger implementations already
updated to the last version of the draft, a not exhaustive list
of them can be found here:
http://www.packetizer.com/webfinger/software.html

Personnel

Salvatore Loreto is the document shepherd.
Barry Leiba is the responsible Area Director.