Re: [salud] Gen-art LC review of draft-ietf-salud-alert-info-urns-12 and also Area Director's review

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

> From: Alexey Melnikov <[e-mail]>

> > It's a tricky matter.  What we really want is MUST, that this is a
> > constraint on the UA, particularly that it must be prepared to cope
> > with any sequence of syntactically-correct URIs, and it must do
> > something that is reasonable in the eyes of the user.  The problem is
> > that this criterion isn't testable in any absolute way, despite the
> > fact that there are a large number of actions that "everybody" would
> > agree are violations.
> 
> If you can show some examples (and add them to the text), that would
> be valuable.

The authors are currently discussing rewriting this paragraph (per a
suggestion by Ben Campbell) in order to make it clear what is meant by
"reasonable".  In practice, it seems that the UA must ignore any URIs
that it cannot understand (e.g., unkown schemes) or cannot act on
(e.g., HTTP URIs to non-local destinations), and construct an alert
based on the URIs that it understands and can act on (which of course
would be a default alert if there were no actionable URIs).

> At first I thought this sentence sounded like "you MUST NOT crash",
> which I thought was obvious and not worth stating. But it looks like
> you have something else in mind?

"must not crash" is important.  So is "must produce *some* alert".
The general idea is "Degraded performance is OK; failure to perfrom is
not OK."

Dale