Re: [mile] [art] Artart last call review of draft-ietf-mile-rolie-10

[Mark Nottingham <[e-mail]>]

On 8 Oct 2017, at 10:08 pm, Martin Thomson <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> The decision to define a .well-known URI without a discovery story is - in my
> opinion - inadvisable.  Such a registration is usually appropriate if you
> design a protocol that depends on discovery by hostname and port.  As such,
> this does not use that at all.  A configuration system can (and should) accept
> a complete URI for the service endpoint.  It would be better to defer creation
> of yet another .well-known URI registration until the working group is certain
> that discovery requires it.

I'll second this. 

Generally,  you only want to register a .well-known when there's a good story for why using a URL isn't possible. Typically, this is when you genuinely need to convey policy or metadata applicable to the whole origin. 

From 5785:

"""
well-known URIs are not intended for general information retrieval or establishment of large URI namespaces on the Web. Rather, they are designed to facilitate discovery of information on a site when it isn't practical to use other mechanisms; for example, when discovering policy that needs to be evaluated before a resource is accessed, or when using multiple round-trips is judged detrimental to performance.

As such, the well-known URI space was created with the expectation that it will be used to make site-wide policy information and other metadata available directly (if sufficiently concise), or provide references to other URIs that provide such metadata.
"""

Cheers,

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