Re: WG Review: Recharter of Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis (httpbis)

--On Friday, February 24, 2012 16:58 +0100 Patrik Fältström
<paf@frobbit.se> wrote:

> On 24 feb 2012, at 16:38, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> 
>> Over in spfbis, people are arguing that the SPF RRTYPE should
>> be deprecated and abandoned in SPF because nobody uses it
>> because of practical difficulties in getting new RRTYPEs
>> deployed.  What makes us think that the arguments in favour
>> of SRV are going to find more fertile ground?
> 
> Because people disagree on whether it is actually hard to get
> new RRTYPEs deployed.
> 
> I for example do completely disagree on it being hard. Sure,
> your user interface in the gui of your favorite $EDITOR might
> not support the new RRTYPE, but should that constrain
> deployment of good standards?

Patrik,

While I don't see it as hard as Andrew does, I don't see it as
easy either.  The problem isn't one's favorite $EDITOR.  It is
the number of folks who, for lots of reasons, haven't upgraded
from operating systems, resolvers, etc., that don't support
newer RRTYPES.   Remember that, while Windows 7 is getting some
of the market share that Vista never did, there are still a huge
number of XP systems out there -- many of them in the hands of
people and organizations who aren't going to make the hardware
investment to upgrade in a difficult economy.  The situation
with the Mac platform actually isn't much better -- I know a lot
of people who haven't (and can't) upgrade from OS 9, much less
to the latest carnivorous feline.  

SRV has the advantage of many year's head start and more utility
to more protocols over, e.g., SPF but the reality remains that,
if some users have support for an important new RRTYPE and
others don't, we have either an inconsistent user experience
(more confusion, more support calls, etc.) or, as we have seen
with DNAME, a need to carry around complex workarounds that can
lead to bugs, vunerabilities, or, ahem, inconsistent user
experience.

And, fwiw, I'm actually much more concerned about use of the DNS
for any part of the process if we don't have broad consensus in
and between the IETF and the implementer community about whether
IRIs or URIs are authoritative and about how domain names
containing IDN labels are encoded in either.   I'm equally
concerned if some organization of our mutual acquaintance is
determined to declare the existence of equivalent names in the
DNS that will create user expectations that certs and comparison
mechanisms cannot support.

--On Thursday, February 23, 2012 14:38 -0800 Doug Barton
<dougb@dougbarton.us> wrote:

> 2782 was published 12 years ago this month. I suppose it can be
> considered mature enough to deploy at this point? :)

One might wish.  But real maturity has to be based on
implementation and deployment, not just publication dates.   I
note, for example, that RFC 736 (an old favorite example of mine
for several reasons) was published over 34 years ago is, like
2782, still at Proposed Standard, and, sadly, hasn't gone
anywhere (at least in the last decade or so).   Certainly it is
elderly as Internet protocols go, but I don't think the leap
from "elderly" to "mature" is obviously justified.

    john

Received on Friday, 24 February 2012 16:44:10 UTC