The IESG has approved the following document: - 'WebFinger' (draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-18.txt) as Proposed Standard This document is the product of the Applications Area Working Group. The IESG contact persons are Barry Leiba and Pete Resnick. A URL of this Internet Draft is: http://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger/ Technical Summary This specification defines the WebFinger protocol, which can be used to discover information about people or other entities on the Internet using standard HTTP methods. WebFinger discovers information for a URI that might not be usable as a locator otherwise, such as account or email URIs. Review and Consensus The "WebFinger" draft has been discussed extensively within the APPSAwg during the last year, it become a wg item in August 2012. Actually at some point the mail traffic generated by the discussion was so high that it was agreed to move the discussion to a dedicated mailing list (webfinger@ietf.org). The only significant point difficult to agree on has been about "whether WebFinger MUST support HTTPS only or instead it should be allowed for WebFinger fallback from HTTPS to HTTP". That was resolved with a consensus call that generated a strong rough consensus for HTTPS only. The draft has been also extensively reviewed during the APPSAwg Last Call. A lot of editorial issues, text clarifications have been raised; all of them are now addressed in the current version of the draft. During the wglc process it has been also agreed to define a new media type for WebFinger. There are several open source WebFinger implementations already updated to the last version of the draft, a not exhaustive list of them can be found here: http://www.packetizer.com/webfinger/software.html Personnel Salvatore Loreto is the document shepherd. Barry Leiba is the responsible Area Director.
