Re: [weirds] Ted Lemon's Discuss on draft-ietf-weirds-rdap-query-16: (with DISCUSS and COMMENT)

[Pete Resnick <[e-mail]>]

On 10/29/14 5:09 PM, Ted Lemon wrote:
> On Oct 29, 2014, at 7:53 PM, Pete Resnick<[e-mail]>  wrote:
>    
>> A client that does the right thing and only queries all-a-label or all-u-label strings is going to get consistent results, because it is taking responsibility to do the appropriate mappings. But if the client is blindly handing over labels it got from somewhere else (which is why you would get mixed stuff),
>>      
> Why would the client do that?

Because clients get their input from all sorts of weird places, and some 
not-so-smart clients do not have the machinery to do the right thing. 
They SHOULD, but they don't.

> Why not specify what the right thing is for the client to do as a SHOULD, and _then_ explain what might break if it doesn't, rather than just sort of talking about it and hoping for the best?
>    

But that's exactly what the second full paragraph of 3.1.3 says now: 
SHOULD be either U-Labels or A-Labels, might break if not (see section 
6.1), here are reasons you might see brokenness, and servers can do what 
they will to make things right.

> Also, U-labels are case-sensitive.   So the semantic difference you're describing doesn't actually exist.

If servers could count on only getting real U-labels, of course. And if 
servers could simply reject crappy input out of hand, life would be much 
simpler. But AFAIU this is a case in which some servers (which serve 
particular constituencies) have to be a bit liberal in what they accept. 
So I think we have to give some information in the document about what 
to do when you get "interesting" input.

> (BTW, what I just explained in the above paragraph gives me a headache and tells me we should _never_ use IDN for any writing system that has case, because it will be insanely easy to spoof.   But you probably already knew that.)
>    

:-)

pr

-- 
Pete Resnick<http://www.qualcomm.com/~presnick/>
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. - [phone]