- From: Martin Hamilton <martin@mrrl.lut.ac.uk>
- Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 12:21:02 +0100
- To: www-talk@w3.org
Larry Masinter writes: | > I have an Internet Draft (draft-hamilton-whois-url-00.txt) which | > specifies a URL format for the WHOIS++ protocol using the scheme | > "whois." Now, it's been suggested that there really ought to be | > separate schemes for the old WHOIS protocol, WHOIS++, and RWhois | > - defined by (respectively) RFCs 954, 1835 and 1714. | | Personally, I'd prefer one URL scheme to three. I don't think there | are clear-cut rules for deciding, though. Are the various WHOIS | schemes interoperable? And is some of th is obsoleted by LDAP? Hmm... Actually, you can use heuristics to infer the protocol, e.g. RWhois servers should respond with a banner message whose first seven characters are %RWhois and WHOIS++ servers should send a banner message whose first five characters are % 220 If the server doesn't return either of these, or hasn't returned anything at all after some timeout period, it must be speaking WHOIS (or non-conformant). The downside is the timeout for WHOIS. These *WHOIS protocols are all "text" based, if you count inclusion of arbitrary character sets as still being text, whereas LDAP is cut-down ASN.1/BER - yikes!
Received on Saturday, 18 May 1996 07:21:10 UTC