Recent whois list traffic

On March 4th, six weeks ago, Scott replied to a suggestion by William Tan
sent to both the whois and provreg lists, on signature services. There is
nothing further in the ietf-whois list archive [1]. If this list has gone
dead, then all the heat and faint light of the IETF-49 BoF are memories,
and someone (an AD or other capable and disinterested person) should sweep
up the debris from this list and post the summary.

This should not be the case. The :48 problem may be solved by abandonment,
but that simply means that :48 implementors will find no other guidance in
the IETF's {BCP,FYI,RFC,STD} series than rfc954 [2] (DS), and whatever the
implementors and their delegating-authories negociate as manditory. These 
non-rfc954 mandates by their nature are implementor:delegating-authority
specific, and could contain requirements similar to the "just use XML"
suggestion made early in this list's life.

The case for "anything other than <querygunk><CRLF> -> response -> close
connection" [3], e.g.:
	o the distinction between "technical" and "social" data [4],
	  definitions and repositories,
	o policy-labeled (EU/OEDC: "data collection", US "privacy"),
	o encodings other than LDH ASCII (see "technical" and "social"),
	o referral (navigation for distributed data models),
	o schema -- a core and one (or more) extension mechanisms,
and for those looking for adventure (and having read Harald's latest roman
a cle, [5])
	o uniqueness and scope,
	o repository method and method temporal properties,
	o consistency (consistency for distributed data models),
	o security (integrity, access, see also policy-labels, above),
	o update models (or invalidation),
is still TBD, with little actual closure on either technical guidance to
ICANN, one well-known delegating-authority, or on a post-43 WG Charter.

I'm happy (sort of) taking my (.biz) whois:43 and post-43 implementor issues
to other similarly situated (fat gTLD registry) implementors outside of the
IETF, and (less so) to the .biz delegating-authority. However, this seems to
lead to a whois:43 and/or post-43 set of services that has a rich, complex,
even baroque taxonomy, in which implementors, models, and above all (pun)
delegating-authorities fail to make use of the IETF as a (current) standards
body.

My sympathies to anyone pouring over Appendix O this weekend.

Cheers,
Eric

References:
[1] http://www.imc.org/ietf-whois/mail-archive/
[2] RFC0954 NICNAME/WHOIS. K. Harrenstien, M.K. Stahl, E.J. Feinler.  
    Oct-01-1985. (Format: TXT=7397 bytes) (Obsoletes RFC0812)
    (Status: DRAFT STANDARD)
[3] Mark Kosters to ietf-whois, Re: Minutes from San Diego, 17 Jan 2001
[4] draft-ietf-provreg-dn-defn-00
[5] draft-alvestrand-directory-defs-02.txt