Keith Moore writes:
I've expressed some concerns about potential for misuse of the registry,
specifically the need to keep it from being used as a way to "stake a
claim" on a header name or the meaning thereof,
Absolutely! Header field names such as Mail-Followup-To have economic
value, damn it. We can't let someone ``stake a claim'' to them on the
basis of some lame excuse such as ``preventing accidental conflicts.''
(How dare anyone deploy Mail-Followup-To software in the first place,
without written permission from the Internet Engineering Steering Group?
Tomorrow I bet they'll try to steal mail.com from the rightful owners!)
or as a way to create "vanity" header fields
``Knoxville - A man was arrested today under the new federal laws
against headersquatting. The man, Keith Moore, had reserved all header
field names shorter than 8 characters at the Grand Unified Registry of
Fields (GURF), making those field names unusable to legitimate users.
Complaints from IBM and Microsoft, who wanted to use IBM-COM: and MSOFT:
respectively, triggered the federal action.''
need to get those fields reviewed (and when applicable, their
definitions published) before widely deploying them.
[ ... ]
I can't think of a single example of a protocol that was standardized
in the same form that it was initially deployed, and usually for good
reasons.
Absolutely! We should never have deployed non-standard interfaces such
as C, and the original Internet protocols, and IRC, and HTTP, and Java,
and Internet telephones, and even something as simple as X-Loop. Look at
how many changes have been made to these interfaces!
We should have sat down in a big room and spent years hashing out
interfaces such as Ada and OSI and SIP and, of course, Quoted-Printable.
These interfaces, unlike C and the Internet and so on, were all designed
perfectly from the start---as you'd expect from a committee. That's why
they've been wildly successful!
And I would far rather we reach consensus by respecting and understanding
each other's concerns than by just trying to isolate me.
We're not trying to isolate you, Keith. We love your leadership! It's so
damnably difficult to design a working protocol without your input.
Anything that keeps you in the loop is good.
---Dan