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Re: minutes for NETCONF WG interim meeting (09/03)

>>>>> Andy Bierman writes:

Andy> The group discussed the format of a capability.  The three
Andy> choices considered were:

Andy> a) separate data elements

Andy>   <capability> <authority>ietf.org</authority>
Andy> <version>1.0</version> <name>candidate</name> </capability>

Andy> b) specific elements

Andy>   <capability> <abc:candidate version="1.0"
Andy> xmlns:abc="http://ietf.org/netconf/capabilities"/> </capability>

Andy> c) URI

Andy>   <capability> http://ietf.org/netconf/capabilities#candidate
Andy> </capability>
  
Andy> The group decided on approach (a) because it is sometimes
Andy> necessary to parse the version number.  Approach (b) requires
Andy> more maintenance when a new capability is created, and also does
Andy> not allow standard and proprietary capabilities to be handled in
Andy> the same fashion.  Approach (c) does not allow the version field
Andy> to be easily identified and parsed.

This is kind of surprising for me. The schema definition of netconf
already uses URIs with embedded version numbers and in the XML world
it just seems a common technique to use URIs for identification
purposes (like SNMP folks are used to use OIDs for identification
purposes). I fail to see the difficulty to parse URIs when the format
is well defined, especially if you consider scripting languages where
this usually can be done with a simple regular expression. (And doing
such things in C is also not that hard - some libraries also help you
by breaking URIs into pieces.)

It should be possible to register a URN namespace for netconf if we
are interested in well controlled names for standardized capabilities.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder		    International University Bremen
<http://www.eecs.iu-bremen.de/>	    P.O. Box 750 561, 28725 Bremen, Germany

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