[regext] Re: Comments Regarding draft-ietf-regext-rdap-extensions-04

[Jasdip Singh <[e-mail]>]

From: Andrew Newton (andy) <[e-mail]>
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2024 at 8:19 AM
To: Hollenbeck, Scott <shollenbeck=[e-mail]>, [e-mail] <[e-mail]>
Subject: [regext] Re: Comments Regarding draft-ietf-regext-rdap-extensions-04

2.4.6:







"A strict interpretation of this wording where "construction of the response" refers to the JSON structure only would rule out the use of Section 2.1.1 extension identifiers, which are in common use in RDAP.", and "For responses to queries other than "/help", a response MUST include in the "rdapConformance" array only those extension identifiers necessary for a client to deserialize the JSON and understand the semantic meaning of the content within the JSON, and each extension identifier MUST be free from conflict with the other identifiers with respect to their syntax and semantics."







I'm a little confused by the text in this section. Is it saying the profile identifiers should be included in the "rdapConformance" array, or not? Profile identifiers do serve a valuable purpose in terms of understanding how the response should be interpreted after it's been deserialized ("understand the semantic meaning of the content within the JSON"), so I *think* this text is saying that they MUST be included. Is that the case?



Yup, that's confusing... and also somewhat contradictory. This was an attempt to clarify the list discussion about what it means to return extension identifiers in the rdapConformance array for non /help queries. Obviously this needs clean up.

As written, this says that only the extensions used to interpret the JSON are to be in rdapConformance. However, the first sentence notes that marker and profile extensions are in common use today, but those don't meet the definition of extensions used to interpret the JSON.

I'd like to know what my co-authors think, but I believe this is overly restrictive as extensions influence more than just the JSON... they also indicate what can be queried and semantics of things like links.

[JS] To Scott’s question about profile/marker identifiers, yes, they must be included in the “rdapConformance” array since they contribute to the “semantic meaning of the content within the JSON”. As for Andy’s point of “also indicate what can be queried”, fair enough, the current text does not explicitly say that, but any response implies some query to start with. The “semantic meaning” phrase also helps cover “semantics of things like links”. But, if having some additional text helps clarify these further, sure.

Jasdip