Re: [Uri-review] Request for review of "ab:" URI scheme

[Bjoern Hoehrmann <[e-mail]>]

* Barry Leiba wrote:
>In the Sieve working group, draft-ietf-sieve-external-lists defines an
>address-book URI scheme, "ab:".  See the draft, here:
>http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-sieve-external-lists

Could you explain why you have picked 'ab' as the scheme instead of
something more verbose? This short it's hard to, say, put the name into
a search engine and expect good to come up, even if you add "scheme" or
some other keyword.

Why does this need an URI scheme to begin with? The draft notes that
"An "ab" URI is designed to be used internally by applications for
referencing address books." and if it's just used internally, then you
could just use whatever you felt like, no need to use URIs.

Do I understand correctly that a URI like `ab:friends` cannot be un-
derstood without some additional context (you need a set of entities
and a "friend" relation between them, for instance)?

If I were to say, this shouldn't use a "ab" scheme, but, say, use an
URN scheme, or some entirely different mechanism (say, make a list of
keywords specifically for the "external lists" SIEVE extension), would
that be some kind of problem, like, do underlying specifications re-
quire this to be a URI scheme?

I think at the beginning of 4.3 you need to have some background infor-
mation about the scheme that makes sense to people who have never ever
heard of SIEVE, addressing the questions above (one or two short para-
graphs should suffice).

The draft needs to point out very clearly that implementations must,
if they process non-internal URIs, properly implement URI processing,
in particular %xx-escapes; right now the draft can easily be misread
to suggest a literal string comparison against "ab:default" is all
that is necessary for conformance.

(In the registration template, I don't think the "Encoding consider-
ations" are quite right, but this was an open issue in the IRI WG when
stopped keeping track, so I am not sure it's wrong or what to replace
it with).
-- 
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