Re: IETF-51 WhoisFix BoF Announcement

"Ross Wm. Rader" <[email protected]> wrote:

>  point was not to criticize the DNSO effort but to point out that a) the
>applicability of their results will be of limited (but still useful value)
>to the Whois BoF effort and b) that discussing Whois in purely a domain
>context is just plain wrong unless the BoF consciously determines this
>limitation and reduces the scope accordingly. In other words, if the goal is
>to replace or augment 954, then let's say so, but be extremely clear that
>the range of applications based on 954 or not purely domain-specific. If on
>the other hand, the goal is to augment the functionality of domain-specific
>whois, then let's take a look at what is currently going on over port 43 and
>look to rfc 1580 for historical guidance....

RFC 1580 is an interesting, historical and informational document. 
It also doesn't accurately reflect the way that Whois is being used 
by very many (if any) people today.  If our goal is to try and take a 
look at what is currently going on over port 43, RFC 1580 is not 
going to be very descriptive of the status quo.

As long as the structure imposed on port 43 queries is made in a way 
that doesn't prevent unstructured queries from functioning as they do 
now (which probably just means that new clients still need to be able 
to deal with unstructured results somehow, probably just by dumping 
them to the screen as occurs now), the existence of other types of 
queries becomes not very important.  Those other uses will simply 
continued unaffected.

Jordyn