Hi James,

Regarding whether you're building a protocol with HTTP, see Section 2 of BCP56. 
If you don't fit those criteria, it indeed isn't using HTTP, but your draft 
isn't clear about that.

The approach you've taken is to tunnel the protocol over POST. As I said, the 
safer, better approach if your intent is to tunnel would be to use HTTP's 
dedicated tunnelling method, CONNECT. HTTP is not a transport protocol, it's a 
representation transfer protocol. There are many benefits to using it well, 
including operability, scalability, and security improvements - ones that may 
not be apparent immediately but are likely to be appreciated in time (at least, 
that's our experience in deploying many HTTP-based protocols).

What does "cloud-friendly" mean?

Cheers,


> On 2 Dec 2025, at 1:36 am, Gould, James <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Mark,
> 
> Thank you for reviewing draft-ietf-regext-epp-https.  Can you provide a list 
> of BCP56 violations with draft-ietf-regext-epp-https?  
> 
> What's important to understand with EoH (draft-ietf-regext-epp-https) is that 
> it's not building a protocol with HTTP but defining an application packet 
> protocol transport based on an existing IETF standard protocol.  The only 
> HTTP actions needed as a packet protocol transport is to establish a stateful 
> session and to push packets.  Intermingling the application packet protocol 
> semantics with the HTTP semantics by mapping the EPP command types to HTTP 
> methods adds complexity with no defined benefit.  Use of the CONNECT method 
> doesn't match the intent of enabling EPP to be Cloud-friendly, since CONNECT 
> is a specialized method that creates a pure tunnel (e.g., having EoT tunnel 
> through HTTP).   
> 
> Can you clarify the interoperability concerns?
> 
> 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 11/30/25, 5:41 PM, "Mark Nottingham via Datatracker" <[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. 
> 
> 
> Document: draft-ietf-regext-epp-https
> Title: Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP) Transport over HTTPS
> Reviewer: Mark Nottingham
> Review result: Not Ready
> 
> 
> This draft violates many aspects of BCP56, and needs substantial revision to
> address that.
> 
> 
> That's because it's tunnelling a protocol over HTTP semantics (primarily 
> POST).
> Doing so prevents many benefits of using HTTP from being realised and may 
> cause
> deployment issues.
> 
> 
> I would recommend mapping the semantics of EPP more faithfully to HTTP -- 
> e.g.,
> <create> to PUT, <delete> to DELETE. This would be a substantially new version
> of EPP but would be much more integrated into the HTTP ecosystem. We can look
> for volunteers from the HTTP community to help with this direction if there's
> interest.
> 
> 
> Failing that, if the authors wish to tunnel, they should do so using CONNECT
> rather than over HTTP semantics (such as POST).
> 
> 
> The draft has other issues (including interoperability concerns) that I won't
> list here as the decision above needs to be made first.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

--
Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/

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