--On Saturday, July 18, 2020 10:38 +1000 Mark Nottingham
<mnot@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> If "expert review" could optionally be accomplished by
>> (dis)approving a Pull Request in an IANA-maintained Git
>> repository (as was recently done for .well-known) so much the
>> better.
>
> I was wondering the same thing. I know we had extensive
> discussions about that draft, and IIRC at the time several
> folks (including me) pointed out that FCFS is incompatible
> with the notion that new schemes should be rare.[1]
>
> Looking at the current registry and the large number of
> provisional registrations without a specification, I'd be
> sorely tempted to make it Specification Required, so that
> there's at least a chance of interoperability. AIUI the
> counterargument is that since many vendors have used the
> scheme as an escape valve to trigger proprietary functions,
> making it spec req'd would disqualify too many registrations.
> It might be worth looking at what encourages them to use it in
> that way (perhaps with the help of WHATWG folks?) and see if
> there's a better solution.
>
> Also, I note that there doesn't appear to be any mechanism for
> removing a provisional registration that's fallen into disuse;
> for example, several appear to reference old Internet-Drafts
> that have never made it to RFC. If provisional registrations
> can't be removed, is there any practical difference between
> provisional and permanent?
Mark,
Extrapolating from the above, it sounds like an interesting
middle ground might be to allow very lightweight provisional
registrations but start a clock on them such that, if a
specification did not appear within a set period of time, they
would be at least marked obsolete and maybe removed from the
registry (the difference being whether the name would be
considered available for reuse). At the risk of more
complexity, perhaps that could be "mark obsolete, allow for some
appeal period that would require proof of active use and at
least a promise of documentation, then remove". One could
further tune something like that to treat I-Ds for a while but
not very long; after that, RFC or some other stable
specification.
That is just an idea, with lots of details absent and in need of
filling in, but I wonder if something like it would address the
issues you are raising without discarding the idea of quick
registrations to eliminate or reduce naming conflicts.
best,
john
