I’m glad you like the direction of my comments.  Sometimes saying what you’re 
*not* doing is as important as saying what you *are* doing, and I think this is 
such a case.

As an example of why this matters, a developer recently asked me “Would we have 
to use a different set of endpoints for OAuth 2.1?”  We should clearly scope 
this work so that the answer is “No, you would use the same endpoints.”

Given that the abstract talks about obsoleting OAuth 2.0, I believe it’s 
important for the abstract to say what’s being obsoleted, what’s not being 
obsoleted, and what the relationship of the new spec is to the one(s) it’s 
obsoleting.  As used in the vernacular by developers, I believe “OAuth 2.0” 
commonly refers to the set of OAuth 2.0 RFCs approved by this working group, 
which are the set of (currently 22) RFCs listed at 
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/oauth/documents/ - as well as at least some of 
the non-RFC specifications that extend OAuth 2.0 via the OAuth registries at 
https://www.iana.org/assignments/oauth-parameters/oauth-parameters.xhtml, 
particularly [OAuth 2.0 Multiple Response Type Encoding 
Practices<https://openid.net/specs/oauth-v2-multiple-response-types-1_0.html>]. 
 I’m pretty sure you intend that OAuth 2.1 keep using much of that widely 
deployed work and not replace it.  You should be clear about that.

Since you say that there are new features in OAuth 2.1, what are they and are 
they essential to the OAuth 2.1 goals?  Or if they’re not essential, could they 
more profitably be factored into another specification so that the new features 
can be used either with OAuth 2.0 and OAuth 2.1?  That might make the resulting 
messaging to developers much clearer.

                                                       Thanks,
                                                       -- Mike

From: Dick Hardt <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2020 6:50 PM
To: Mike Jones <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: Clarifying the scope of the OAuth 2.1 spec

Hi Mike

I like where you are going with this, but what do we mean when we say OAuth 
2.0? Is it RFC 6749? What is the OAuth 2.0 set of protocols?

OAuth 2.1 includes features that are not in RFC 6749, so it is not a subset of 
that specification.
ᐧ

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 2:34 PM Mike Jones 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The abstract of draft-parecki-oauth-v2-1 concludes with this text:
   This specification replaces and obsoletes the OAuth 2.0 Authorization 
Framework described in RFC 6749<https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6749>.

While accurate, I don’t believe that this text captures the full intent of the 
OAuth 2.1 effort – specifically, to be a recommended subset of OAuth 2.0, 
rather than to introduce incompatible changes to it.  Therefore, I request that 
these sentences be added to the abstract, to eliminate confusion in the 
marketplace that might otherwise arise:

    OAuth 2.1 is a compatible subset of OAuth 2.0, removing features that are 
not currently considered to be best practices.  By design, it does not 
introduce any new features to what already exists in the OAuth 2.0 set of 
protocols.

                                                       Thanks,
                                                       -- Mike

P.S.  I assert that any incompatible changes should be proposed as part of the 
TxAuth effort and not as part of OAuth 2.1.

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