Re: [idn] prefix/suffixes in internet-draft

[Olafur Gudmundsson <ogud@tislabs.com>]

At 02:38 PM 11/21/00, Marc Blanchet wrote:
>Some ->personal<- thoughts on prefix/suffixes in internet-drafts:
>
>- we have many different ace proposals (more coming tomorrow)

And more later, I'm sure.


>- I think that putting a specific prefix example (bq-- or anything else) 
>do not add any value to the technical contribution. while this is not a 
>problem in general, looks like it is causing issues around it right now in 
>the "industry".

For me the value of the prefix is identifier of an encoding.
This is useful when encoded strings are taken out of context, say WG 
mailing list.


>My proposal:
>- wg get out of prefix reservation. this is not our business. we should 
>defer this to some appropriate organisation (with the input of the ietf of 
>course)
>- internet-drafts do not include any prefix examples in future revisions. 
>use some notation like <ace prefix> in the draft. state that an 
>appropriate organisation should assign the prefix when appropriate.

I disagree and think we should rather follow the following set of rules:
1. Encoding in ID will be changed by IANA before publication as an RFC
2. Encoding in ID must contain an internal version number that is updated
when encoding is updated/changed/extended etc.
3. Encoding format for ID prefixes is
         IDN--EEn-
Where IDN-- is the working group name, (will be removed before RFC is 
published)
         EE is two character identifier of encoding,
         n is version number (reflecting ID number) (0..9a-z)


This forces implementors to make allowance for changes, it also guarantees
the final result will be better (longer names allowed) thus forcing
people to update to standard faster (that is if ACE is selected).

Just my personal opinion,

         Olafur
PS: I will take on allocating the prefix letter to different proposals if
none else wants to.
Ólafur Guðmundsson              ogud@tislabs.com        ogud@ogud.com