toward HTTP as IETF best practice/IANA policy for registries?

In a TAG finding approved 8 Apr 2002, in
reply to an issue[i9] raised Dec 2001, we wrote:

"The TAG requests that IANA, the authority which adminsters the registry
of Internet media types, be committed to providing persistent and
dereferencable URIs that return a document containing..."
 -- http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/2002/01-uriMediaType-9

[i9] chronicles our attempts to convey this
to the IETF/IANA, which have not resulted
in either a "yes" nor a "no" from IETF/IANA.

I took an action to research when/if the IETF
made some decision not to use HTTP for their
registry, but in the course of investigating,
it occured to me that the way to ask the IETF
a question -- or more to the point -- the
way to propose something to the IETF is
to write an Internet Draft, solicit review,
and see if consensus emerges... IETF/IANA
policies seem to be documented in
Best Current Practice (BCP) documents that
start life as Internet Drafts.

I brought this up at monday's TAG telcon,
and folks concurred...
  http://www.w3.org/2002/08/12-tag-summary#arch-doc

Roy reminded us of the new CRISP working group:

  Cross Registry Information Service Protocol
  http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/crisp-charter.html

and suggested that it seemed pretty straightforward
to do this sort of thing with an HTTP server.
Perhaps that's one place where we should discuss
the use of HTTP for IANA registries.

I could perhaps find time to write such
an Internet Draft (explaining that HTTP isn't
the only URI scheme that's dereferenceable,
but it's the most cost-effective one, etc....),
but I expect that would
be just the tip of the iceberg, in terms
of time. The real time cost is in
discussing/defending the proposal, and
I don't think I could do that without putting
my other obligations at risk.

So... I'm looking for volunteers to help...
to co-author, to participate in the followup
discussions, etc.

If you're interested, please let me know.

Feel free to reply to me off-list.

[i9] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#uriMediaType-9

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/

Received on Friday, 16 August 2002 13:41:02 UTC