The "vendor subtree" for ACAP, establishing a textual namespace for
components in hierarchical metadata, has the registry of assignments at:
http://www.iana.org/assignments/acap-registrations
This RFC 2244 data is also used by IMAP ANNOTATE (RFC 5257,
experimental) and the ANNOTATEMORE/ANNOTATEMORE2/METADATA draft series
(now: draft-daboo-imap-annotatemore-13.txt).
Given that ACAP has not been a success, is there a more up-to-date
reference for valid syntax of these names, both for developers and as
guidance to IANA? As far as I can tell, four of the nine registrations
are syntactically invalid and this appears to have arisen because of
unfortunate labelling in RFC 2244. If there is a more up-to-date
reference, or even if not, can guidance be provided to IANA? What
should happen about existing registrations? I suspect that they can
safely be truncated just before the invalid "/" and still provide a
complete and consistent registry.
The vendor-token which has to be registered with IANA is described in
RFC2244 as vendor.<vendor/product> which seems to have been interpreted
as: "vendor." <vendor> "/" <product>
Similarly, "vendor.<company/product name>." is used in section 7.4,
which also makes it clear that all subtrees are covered by a given
registration (leading to my belief that truncation in the existing
registry is the correct approach).
The ABNF in RFC2244 section 4.3 uses vendor-name twice and defines it:
----------------------------8< cut here >8------------------------------
name-component = 1*UTF8-CHAR
;; MUST NOT contain ".", "/", "%", or "*"
[...]
vendor-name = vendor-token *("." name-component)
vendor-token = "vendor." name-component
;; MUST be registered with IANA
----------------------------8< cut here >8------------------------------
This ties in intuitively with the use of both "/" and "." as hierarchy
separators by the various protocols using this registration.
Furthermore, taken too literally, given the registration of
vendor-token, the definition of vendor-token in RFC2244 and the
reference to vendor-token in RFC5257, for a registration "vendor.foo" we
would end up with IMAP annotation entries named "/vendor/vendor.foo/bar"
when clearly what's intended is to end up with "/vendor/foo/bar".
Common sense makes it easy enough to pick out what is meant, but what is
defined in ABNF in two RFCs doesn't match.
With two RFCs and a draft on the way, what's the cleanest way to deal
with this?
-Phil
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