Eliot Lear wrote: > Please say more because this is not at all clear to me. Why are more > TLAs (or in this case FLAs) there? Also, you've defined another term: > Identity Assessor. Why?
There is real and substantial confusion in the community about these two tag values. Confusion that affects interoperability. (I tend to use the cliche' about watches: if you have one, you know what time it is; if you have two, you are never quite sure.) I regularly hear someone explain their particular, reasonable and sophisticated intent behind using one or another of the two values, as if there is some magic by which the organization running the other side of the DKIM exchange is going to a) be motivated, and b) be knowledgeable enough, to incorporate that intent into their use of DKIM. In fact, the other participant has no way of knowing about that intent, and scaling limits make it impossible to incorporate all the different intents. What is missing is the thing that has always been at the core of successful Internet protocol interoperability: a small, common, core of semantics. The DKIM community disagrees about which of the two values is that common, core, semantic output. Creating distinctive names for the two makes a reference that uses one of them unambiguous; clarifying the role and relationship of each makes the meaning of each unambiguous. That's goodness. It's also essential for interoperability. > Finally, I'll add one more comment, and then I'll withdraw. There are a > lot of errata filed for 4741. This is a good indication that it's > probably time for another version, and I would view this as good news > because it demonstrates a lot of work has occurred, Good point. So I'll suggest that we considered this proposed Errata as an Errata entry, first and by itself, and *then* pursue generating a revised dkimbase RFC. That way we focus on the proposed Errata narrowly, and reach consensus on it, before expanding the scope to an entirely new RFC. Tony's suggestion that we pursue Draft status at the same time makes sense to me. I had forgotten there were all those other errata. d/ ps. I can't find any documentation that says anything about Errata scope other than it covers 'errors'. Beyond that legalistic point, the proposed change is, in fact, quite narrow and it merely fixes the technical ambiguity about the output that the document says is its primary goal. -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net _______________________________________________ NOTE WELL: This list operates according to http://mipassoc.org/dkim/ietf-list-rules.html
