Subject: draft-nottingham-site-meta: registration too slow, opaque

From: Dan Connolly <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:38:25 -0500

Sorry I didn't review and comment when the draft first
became available...

Regarding:

"Before a period of 30 days has passed, the Designated
   Expert will either approve or deny the registration request,
   communicating this decision both to the review list and to IANA."
 -- http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham-site-meta-03.txt

My experience is that this sort of latency results in developers
working around the IANA and IETF. Please set up a form so
that with latency of a few seconds, somebody can have their
token provisionally registered. (Perhaps an email callback
will have to precede the form.)

By way of example, consider the W3C XPointer Scheme Name Registry form
   http://www.w3.org/2005/04/xpointer-schemes/0register
(though it's perhaps not completely shiny either...
I see one example of "Status: Being reviewed
Last updated on 2006-10-11" on
http://www.w3.org/2005/04/xpointer-schemes/ )
        
I have tried to keep W3C out of the registry business all together,
but IANA is widely reputed to be slow and opaque, and my own
personal experience bears that out to some extent, so I can't
completely stop people who are willing to set up registries in W3C
(not to mention elsewhere...). If IANA has in fact gotten a lot better
lately, perhaps we just need to address the perception part.

As it is, section 5 doesn't even give an exact email
address of where to send registration requests. That sends
people on a scavenger hunt right from step 1.

Perhaps a/the "datatracker" addresses my concern about latency
and transparency... if mail to [email-masked] results in an
automated "ticket" response, with a pointer to a status page that always
has a clear bound on the latency for the next step, that
would suffice (if it's actually documented in section 5).

Hmm... it's entitled "IETF I-D Tracker", which suggests
its scope doesn't include IANA registration requests.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/idtracker/

-- 
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
gpg D3C2 887B 0F92 6005 C541  0875 0F91 96DE 6E52 C29E

---

From: Nicolas Williams <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:49:28 -0500

> lately, perhaps we just need to address the perception part.

For a first-come-first-served name registry, with simple naming
constraints, I think one should be able to automate a registry.  Some
latency is needed to deal with spammers, of course.  Even if you need
Expert review, the name camping part of the process can be automated.

Whether the IANA can deal with automating such things, I don't know, but
if not then it may just be a matter of tools availability.

---

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:57:35 +1100

I think the key question here is whether the contents of a registered  
well-known URL need to have an interoperable specification available.

If so, the current registration policy (Specification Required, which  
implies Designated Expert) is appropriate.

If we're willing to allow anything to be registered (e.g., FooCorp  
wants to place a completely opaque file on Web servers, and reserve  
URI space for it; likewise for a developer who wants to try something  
out, only to decide next week that it's not a good idea, or that they  
got it slightly wrong), First Come First Served may be more appropriate.

Getting an entry in this registry effectively dictates the format of a  
URL on every Web server on the planet. Do we really want to  
accommodate developers with such short attention spans?

Regardless of that, I agree that the registration process explanation  
in the draft needs to be tightened up, and that more visible feedback  
would be helpful. I think this could be addressed by creating a  
dedicated mailing list for review (assuming we keep the current  
policy) and having the initial submission and discussion take place on  
it; it would be the job of the expert reviewer to forward approved  
registrations to IANA for publication.

Cheers,

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

---

From: Mark Nottingham <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:08:35 +1100

... proposed changes at:
   http://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-site-meta-04.txt
diff:
   http://www.mnot.net/drafts/draft-nottingham-site-meta-04-from-3.diff.html

It may be that we can reuse uri-review@, but for the time being I've  
specified a new list.

Cheers,