[webfinger] Default language (Was: Last Call: <draft-ietf-appsawg-webfinger-10.txt> (WebFinger) to Proposed Standard

["Martin J. Dürst"]

Hello Stephane,

On 2013/04/02 19:38, 'Stephane Bortzmeyer' wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 02, 2013 at 10:59:53AM +0900,
>   Martin J. Dürst<duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp>  wrote
>   a message of 57 lines which said:
>
>> Maybe this should actually be an erratum to RFC 6415?
>
> I'm not sure.

I'm also not sure. That's why I wrote "Maybe".

> Errata are not supposed to be used when you disagree
> with the working group, only when there is an involuntary slip. To
> quote draft-rfc-editor-errata-process:
>
> We note that allowing technical errata is a slippery slope: there may
> be a temptation to use errata to "fix" protocol design errors, rather
> than publishing new RFCs that update the erroneous documents.  In
> general, an erratum is intended to report an error in a document,
> rather than an error in the design of the protocol [...]
>
> In this case, it seems the working group made a wrong choice, but
> deliberately.

I think it's going a bit too far to say that there was a deliberate choice.

I wasn't there, but it most probably just went like this: somebody got 
the idea that having a default would be a good idea, somebody proposed 
to use "default", and that was it. There was nobody who checked whether 
somebody else already had similar ideas (not only is there "und", but 
there's also "i-default"),...

So there probably wasn't much deliberation. Also, as a draft, RFC 6415 
was draft-hammer-hostmeta, so there wasn't a WG at all.

Regards,   Martin.