[ire] CSV woes

[Klaus Malorny <[e-mail]>]

Hi all,

unfortunately, I now have to deal with the CSV format and read through the -05 
version* of the document (previously, I skipped that CSV parts). I got the 
following questions:

- the separator: a separator different to the default comma separator can
   be specified by the "sep" attribute. Following the schema definition,
   it can be any token, including multi-character strings or even an empty
   string (which makes the file unparsable, of course). I don't think that
   this is intended

- it is left open how to deal with special characters, including, but
   not limited to, quotes, separators and newlines. I wonder why there
   is no reference to RFC 4180

- it is unclear to me why the "deletes" entries may have subtables included,
   e.g. the "csvDomain:deletes" the "domainContacts", as depicted in
   the example in section 5.1.2 on page 23. Does it mean that in incremental or
   differential escrows, the CSV format allows the addition and removal of
   individual multi-value entries? For example, if I have the domain
   "example.tld", and the technical contact has changed from "abc123" to
   "def456", the "domainContacts" table in the <csvDomain:contents>
   section would *only* contain the line

     example.tld,def456,tech

   (and missing the admin and billing references) and the "domainContacts"
   table in the <csvDomain:deletes> section would contain an entry

     example.tld,abc123,tech

   This would be a large difference to the XML format, as there the full
   object is always being replaced, and it would be also quite a hassle and
   error-prone to generate or read and process this.

- I do not understand why in "domainNameServers", hosts are referenced
   by their ROIDs, whereas in "domainContacts", contacts are referenced
   by their IDs, especially as this seems to have been changed to the
   worse. The specification argues with supporting both hostAttr and hostObj
   models, however, it leaves completely open how the hostAttr model
   is represented.

These are the questions for now, maybe more come later ;-)

Regards,

Klaus



* http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-arias-noguchi-dnrd-objects-mapping-05