Re: Minutes from San Diego

On Wed, Jan 17, 2001 at 07:24:05AM -0800, Randy Bush wrote:
> actually, the whois port/protocol is used by all sorts of strange and arcane
> uses by all sorts of folk.  imiho, we do not have the prerogative to break
> their uses by a change to the base whois/43 protocol.

I agree. For anything other than <querygunk><CRLF> -> response -> close
connection, we have to move on.

> this is not to say that some group of applications of the whois protocol
> could not agree to use it in a common way, essentially forming an overlay
> protocol.

RWhois tried to do that with the intention of the client defaulting
to a whois style query if no banner initially was received from the server
with perhaps some uniform result.

The big question is we "patch" whois to do navigation uniformly or do we 
start creating a new protocol that deals with internationization,
access control, query syntax, schema identication, and navigation. If
we create a new protocol, I think it would be prudent if ICANN publish 
requirements that this new service should provide before we go into
protocol design. Many of the highly visible whois services are beholden
to ICANN regulations and it would be good if we had a protocol that
matched ICANN requirements.

Mark

-- 

Mark Kosters             [email protected]       Verisign Applied Research
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