[gtld-tech] [weirds] Search Engines Indexing RDAP Server Content

[John Levine]

To pile on a little:

>> 2. Standardized query/response/errrors?  Again, a stretch.  301, 302, 404, 429... big deal. 
>Anyway, AWIP and CNRA have tried to do the first two.
>
>For machine-to-machine communication, this is a very big deal.  And
>it's not only response codes. ...

Anyone who thinks that standardized queries and responses is not a big
deal has clearly never tried to write a WHOIS parser.  Mine is over
3500 lines of perl and still misses lots of cases.  

Standardized redirection is already a big win for IP address lookups,
since the RIRs swap space around all the time, but there are plenty of
domains where subtrees are handled by different entities, with .ac.uk
vs the rest of .uk being an obvious example.  I am the registry for a
bunch of tiny geographical subdomains of .us.  Currently there's no
way to ask about my registrants but with RDAP there should be.

>> 3. Ahem... extensibility?  Really?  Anyone wishing to support anything beyond the profile must
>undergo the dreaded RSEP, effectively muting this benefit. 

There are over 200 ccTLDs.

>> 5. Standardized bootstrapping?  New gTLDs must all support whois.nic.<tld>

There are over 200 ccTLDs.  It's also impressive how many of the WHOIS
names for new gTLDs in the IANA database are not whois.nic.<tld>.

>> 6. Standardized redirection for thin?  There are three thin registries: com, net, tv.  All
>provide the reference to registrar with the same key "whois server:"

There are over 200 ccTLDs.  Oh, and .jobs is thin too. although it's
hard to use since the name of its whois server in the IANA database is
wrong.

R's,
John