A couple of comments Comment 1 Section 1.1 Nit: the detail on REST and RESTful seems out of place in a list of acronyms and abbreviations. Comment 2 Section 2 ## Additionally, resource management, provisioning and update functions ## are out of scope for this document. Registries have various and ## divergent methods covering these functions, and it is unlikely a ## uniform approach for these functions will ever be possible. Nit: should be "it is unlikely that a uniform approach ... is needed for interoperability." Comment 3 Section 3.2 Confusion: domain/domains and entity/entities plural forms are defined externally to the list, but nameserver/nameservers plural form is not. I think that is just an inconstency. The word ''match'' is used referring to a FQDN. Does this mean to imply ''match'' as defined in RFC 1034 (where '*' matches anything)? And what is throwing me is that this begins talking about testing to see if something exists and then seems to start talking about finding inexact matches (the plurals). It reads as if the first paragraph doesn't relate to the rest of the section. Comment 4 Section 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 Confusion: Both 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 cover searching for name servers. Why are two approaches presented? http://example.com/rdap/nameservers?name=ns1.example*.com and http://example.com/rdap/domains?nsLdhName=ns1.example*.com I suppose this isn't a major issue, but seems awkward. Comment 5 Section 4.2 Needed work: What is a "name-record" ? I can imagine a few different meanings, which is the problem. Is this a "registration" , i.e., the mapping of the network object to an entity (set)? Are associated "name-records" like variants of IDNs? Are they related in a IP hierarchy, or somehow jointly registered objects? Comment 6 Section 4.2 - later on Confusion: It sounds here that a client cannot set up an expectation that it's query will return something specific or return a list, which is bad (meaning the client can’t set expectation). A client ought to be able to know what it will get back, even if it is an error. What I mean is 'returning information that was not explicitly selected by an exact-match lookup' is ... is bothering me. Maybe these terms need to be ironed out better: search vs. lookup and what does match mean. I do see match defined - after it is used a few times. And in section 3.2, I first ran into the confusion of search v. lookup. (In the DNS world, we distunguish this by saying DNS does not search, it does a lookup.) Comment 7 Section 5 Suggestion: this seems to be begging for a "standard" definition of an non-standard extension prefix - or everyone will use "custom_" because that is the example here. (Name collisions.) And if a custom one becomes a standard, can the transition be eased? (TXT to SPF issue.) And how do we encourage more standard and fewer uniques (the EPP[EXT] issue)? Comment 8 Section 6 Suggestion: Shouldn't RDAP applications be considered to be IDNA2008 aware? The argument for this is in RFC 6912. Or is that pressing a policy into the protocol needlessly? Comment 9 Section 8 ## Search functionality also increases the privacy risk of disclosing ## object relationships that might not otherwise be obvious. For ## example, a search that returns IDN variants [RFC6927] that do not ## explicitly match a client-provided search pattern can disclose ## information about registered domain names that might not be otherwise ## available. Implementers need to consider the policy and privacy ## implications of returning information that was not explicitly ## requested. I think this can improved by mentioning that implementers need to “consider policy and privacy implications, e.g., by checking for authorization to release information to the requestor, in all cases and especially here, when returning information that was not explicitly requested.” In general, I’ve always been a little suspect on RDAP’s search ability and now carefully reading the last call documents am still a little shaky on it. Perhaps the word “search” to me has a wider definition than is being applied here, where RDAP just looks for a common pre-amble (prefix, starting string, whatever you want to call it). I am aware of the perils of unicode, sigh, but I wish there was a chance to have a search definition that was free of ASCII assumptions and was always mindful of the authorization to “release” information. I am aware I’m saying this very late in the game. I’m willing to accept the definition going forward as is. But I wanted to drop the comment somewhere. But please add in, where implementers “consider”, mention of the authorization model. This is because I can see operators pulling open source tools for this from the shelf, they won’t be handcrafting the code, and need some place to “configure this”.
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