Re: [Uri-review] [Fwd: I-D Action:draft-melnikov-mailserver-uri-to-historic-00.txt]

[Alfred Hönes <[e-mail]>]

My apologies for cross-posting, but this should perhaps reach a
broader audience.   I suggest to send feedback to the uri-review
at ietf.org mailing list, because Alexey sent his I-D announcement
there as well.


At Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:26:32 +0000 , Alexey Melnikov wrote:

> FYI. I've asked on Apps-discuss about deprecating the mailserver:
> URIs and I've heard several voices in favor of doing that.
>
> I will be asking Peter Saint-Andre to sponsor this document.
>
> ...
>
>    Filename        : draft-melnikov-mailserver-uri-to-historic-00.txt
> ...


There are two more, apparently natively orphaned URI schemes listed
as 'provisional' in the IANA registry, both mentioned in RFC 1630
for the first time, and later again in RFC 1738, but never formally
registered and, AFAICS, still lacking any publicly available
specification:

   a)  tn3270

   b)  afs


A quick Google search does not reveal any hints on definitions and/or
actual use.  Some W3C web pages consider these as "reserved" names.

Apparently none of the various RFCs on Telnet extensions for TN3270
and the somehow related MIB module specifications mention the 'tn3270'
URI scheme.
Even stronger, for 'afs', archived mail (from 1993) seems to confirm
that 'afs' as a URI scheme was a very poor idea from its beginning
(see "afs: considered harmful",
<http://wwwwbs.cs.tu-berlin.de/html/urls/0148.html> ).

I suggest to consider deprecating these reserved URI scheme names
as well, in a single draft together with the 'mailserver' scheme
(to save work in the process).

Thereby, the registrations would be moved to "Historic", which,
according to the definition of that RFC status, does not immediately
invalidate existing use cases (if any), but serves to clarify that
new implementations should not try to support the subject.
The scheme names would remain in the registry, thus keeping the names
"reserved", i.e. out of availability for incompatible new use.

So there are a few questions, for both cases:

1)  Is anybody aware of a specification for the above provisional
    URI schemes ?

2)  If "yes" for 1), are there interoperable implementations?

3)  Are these URI schemes in actual use anywhere
    (even if only intended for interpretation by brainware) ?

4)  Do the answers to the above questions support deprecation?



Kind regards,
  Alfred.

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