Re: irc: [was: New URN suggestion ]

[[e-mail]]

Mandar,
the document looks nice.

You might want to check out http://www.apps.ietf.org/apps/url-schemes.html
for questions I will want to raise about it once you ask the IESG to
consider it for Proposed Standard.

(By fiat of the Applications ADs, new URL schemes must be standards-track
documents.)

My comments so far:

    <port>  (optional)
      The port number to connect to. If  :<port> is omitted,  the port
      defaults to 6667. This may change in the future to default to the
      IANA assigned IRC port 194, as it gains widespread use amongst
      IRC servers.

This won't work.
You MAY get away with "connect to 194, if it fails, you may try connecting
to 6667", but this language changes the meaning of an URL over time, and
that simply doesn't work at ALL.

Questions based on my knowledge of IRC:

- Do you have any thought of naming NETWORKS rather than servers?
  It would be distasteful to me to experience the pain of connecting
  to us.undernet.org when the network distance to no.undernet.org is
  close to zero (slowest speed link is 2 Mbit/sec, and lightly loaded).
  Of course, names are a pain to match up....

- Do you have any thought of controlling in the URL any other parameter
  of the session than the channel name to join?

- Do you see any advantage to having an URL for IRC nicknames?

Have fun!

                Harald A