Re: [salud] Christer's review of draft-ietf-salud-alert-info-urns-09

[Christer Holmberg <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

>>>> BTW, the following sentence is unclear to me:
>>>>
>>>>    "In practice, this specification extends Alert-Info in that it will
>>>>    cause the use of a new class of URIs and the use of multiple URIs."
>>>>
>>>> What does it mean?
>>>
>>> The idea is that, while 3261 syntactically and semantically
>>> *allows* non-HTTP URIs in Alert-Info, nobody ever used non-HTTP
>>> URIs in Alert-Info, and nobody implemented an interpretation of
>>> those URIs.
>>> Thus, even though we are not changing what is officially
>>> permitted, implementers will have to change their code because the
>>> new *practice* will be an extension of the old practice.  (And
>>> both the new practice and the old practice are a small subset of
>>> what is permitted by 3261.)
>>
>> Well, then you should use different wording. Because, the draft does
>> not extend Alert-Info, it simply describes the usage of a new URN in
>> the header field.
>
> That's what the phrase "in practice" is indicates -- although using
> such a URN was allowed in Alert-Info in principle, the meaning of such
> usae was not defined, and no device actually used such a URN.  With
> this RFC, the situation is changed, the usage is extended in practice.

You can say that, in practice the Alert-Info header field has been used with HTTP URIs, but I don’t like talking about extending the header field, because that is not what you are doing.

Regards,

Christer