Hi. Inspired by part of the SPF discussion but separate from it, Patrik, Andrew, and I discovered a shortage of registries for assorted DNS RDATA elements. We have posted a draft to establish one for TXT RDATA. If this requires significant discussion, we seek guidance from relevant ADs as to where they would like that discussion to occur.
Three notes: * As the draft indicates, while RFC 5507 and other documents explain why subtypes are usually a bad idea, the registry definition tries to be fairly neutral on the subject -- the idea is to identify and register what is being done, not to pass judgment. * While the use of special labels (in the language of 5507, prefixes and suffixes) mitigates many of the issues with specialized use of RDATA fields, they do not eliminate the desirability of a registry (especially for debugging and analysis purposes). * While examining the DNS-related registries that exist today, we discovered that some other registries seemed to be missing and that the organization of the registries seemed to be sub-optimal. We considered attempting a "fix everything" I-D, but concluded that the TXT RDATA registry was the most important need and that it would be unwise to get its establishment bogged down with other issue. The I-D now contains a temporary appendix that outlines the other issues we identified. IMO, thinking through the issues in that appendix, generating the relevant I-D(s), and moving them through the system would be a good exercise for someone who has little experience in the IETF and who is interested in IANA registries and/or DNS details. I am unlikely to find time to do the work myself but would be happy to work with a volunteer on pulling things together. best, john ---------- Forwarded Message ---------- Date: Friday, August 30, 2013 05:52 -0700 From: internet-dra...@ietf.org To: i-d-annou...@ietf.org Subject: I-D Action: draft-klensin-iana-txt-rr-registry-00.txt A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories. Title : An IANA Registry for Protocol Uses of Data with the DNS TXT RRTYPE Author(s) : John C Klensin Andrew Sullivan Patrik Faltstrom Filename : draft-klensin-iana-txt-rr-registry-00.txt Pages : 8 Date : 2013-08-30 Abstract: Some protocols use the RDATA field of the DNS TXT RRTYPE for holding data to be parsed, rather than for unstructured free text. This document specifies the creation of an IANA registry for protocol- specific structured data to minimize the risk of conflicting or inconsistent uses of that RRTYPE and data field. The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-klensin-iana-txt-rr-registry [...]