Re: Report on testing of the link relations registry

I think you are missing something very basic. If everyone does as you want to do, and side-step registries that they consider are not working, instead of working either to use them, or fix them, or obsolete them and formally replace them, we get chaos.

IANA is a formal registration authority with good processes, trustability, and visibility. They, and those building the link relations registry there, are willing to make that registry work, yes, even for you.  Either work with them, or persuade IANA to dismantle this particular registry, or make confusion by having multiple 'registries', some apparently uncontrolled, for the same thing.

On Sep 1, 2010, at 16:00 , Ian Hickson wrote:
> I'm not interested in playing the blame game. The point is that the 
> registries don't work.

These two statements are pretty close to being in conflict.

>> IANA is very successful, respected, and useful, for many many types.  
> 
> I question all three of those premises,

"IANA is responsible for global coordination of the Internet Protocol addressing systems, as well as the Autonomous System Numbers used for routing Internet traffic." (quoted verbatim from their web site). How well is IP addressing and routing working for you?

> but it is not my goal to attack 
> IANA or defend the Microformats community (or indeed the WHATWG community 
> or the Wikipedia community; it would be equally fine by me for a registry 
> to be in those places too). My point is just that the process for keeping 
> track of registered link relation types should be one that is suited to 
> today's Web, with minimal overhead. We shouldn't have to send an e-mail, 
> wait for a human to respond, etc, when all we want to do is say "I'm going 
> to use this type".


Well, someone should be able to check "that type is already registered or in use", for a start.  Not everyone is omniscient, that's why we have a singular registry per type to keep some kind of sanity and avoid collisions.

Me, I am thinking of registering the domain google.co.us (which is, apparently, not registered, according to whois), for myself.  Or should a person check that such a registration is reasonable?

David Singer
Multimedia and Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Wednesday, 1 September 2010 23:18:04 UTC