Andy, It's a little of a chicken and the egg use case with the help. The RFC makes it clear that the help is meant to provide useful information for clients, which can be used for discovery and troubleshooting, but the feature has been primarily ignored with the existing set of RDAP extensions. Once there are RDAP extensions that are using the help to provide useful information, then the clients will be encouraged to start using it based on the added value. Having the hook to provide helpful information to RDAP clients from the RDAP servers is a good feature that RDAP extension authors should consider leveraging. Hopefully, the extensions being created going forward will consider the use of the help hook.
Thanks, -- JG James Gould Fellow Engineer [email protected] <applewebdata://13890C55-AAE8-4BF3-A6CE-B4BA42740803/[email protected]> 703-948-3271 12061 Bluemont Way Reston, VA 20190 Verisign.com <http://verisigninc.com/> On 7/13/23, 9:00 AM, "Andrew Newton" <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Caution: This email originated from outside the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. On Thu, Jul 13, 2023 at 8:25 AM Gould, James <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > In draft-gould-regext-rdap-versioning, we were looking to provide meta-data > about the supported RDAP extensions and their versions, and our > interpretation was the same from RFC 9082 to extend the "help" for that > purpose. The meta-data can at a minimum help with troubleshooting and can be > leveraged by RDAP clients if it provides useful information. Discovery > capabilities is defined in RFC 9082 with the Help Path Segment, but the RDAP > extensions defined thus far have not consistently leveraged it. I add the > leading sentence for the RFC 9082 Help Path Segment for reference: > > "The help path segment can be used to request helpful information (command > syntax, terms of service, privacy policy, rate-limiting policy, supported > authentication methods, supported extensions, technical support contact, > etc.) from an RDAP server." > > To me this is meant for discovery. I doubt there are any RDAP clients that use /help other than to render information to the user. And I bet /help is seldom, if ever, a query most servers see (this would actually be a great measurement for a study). I do give Pawel credit for pointing out one of the few use cases that exist, but we don't yet have production deployment of OpenID with RDAP. Even with that we must be careful to understand there is a difference between having an ability to serialize expressions and having those expressions be productively meaningful. Interestingly, from the list of "helpful information" enumerated in RFC 9082 is rate-limiting policy. Rate limiting is a persistent issue in this space, and this is an area where clients can modify their behavior if given the right expressions. Ok. So we have 2 use cases (IMHO :) ). -andy _______________________________________________ regext mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/regext
