First, to the REGEXT Area Director, I will state it is the consensus of the Working Group that v18 is ready to be considered for publication as a Proposed Standard.
Of particular interest to our Area Director, this message briefly summarizes the activity of this document starting from its WGLC in December 2021 and ending with the one outstanding question remaining from IETF Last Call of the document for which the Working Group consensus is that the issue is not in scope to be addressed by this Working Group. As a procedural matter, this document’s official status within the IESG is “Waiting for Writeup::AD Followup”. As a practical matter, what this means is that the document is within the joint purview of both the Working Group and our Area Director because it has not actually been submitted for consideration to the IESG as a whole, the step that happens after the AD prepares the necessary writeup. This document has undergone a fair amount of discussion and revision as a result of both WGLC and IETF Last Call. Our AD has been waiting for the summary in this message, from myself as the co-Chair shepherding this particular document on behalf of the working group, in order to make a decision as to whether or not the document is ready to be submitted to the entire IESG. The document draft-ietf-regext-epp-eai started its Working Group Last Call in December 2021 with v04. Several suggestions were made during WGLC that resulted in v07. A final review and preparation of the Shepherd Write-Up by the Document Shepherd resulted in v08 in April 2022, which was submitted to the IESG in May 2022. In late May 2022 an IETF Last Call was issued and a number of Directorate reviews were initiated. This broader review raised quite a number of questions and suggestions, motivated a number of threads on the mailing list, and ultimately resulted in v16 in August 2022. There remained a small number of comments open from reviews, all but one of which were resolved by mutual agreement by March 2023 in v18. It is the consensus of the Working Group that v18 of this document has considered all questions and issues raised and that it is ready to be considered for publication as a Proposed Standard. It is important to describe the one technical concern that has not been resolved from the point of view of at least one IETF participant (John Klensin primarily but a couple of others have made supportive comments along the way) because the issue is one of general concern to the ART area of which this working group is a member and for which our AD is responsible. Simply put, what this document proposes is that when an EPP session is initiated, the client and server may negotiate the use of an option labeled SMTPUTF8 and, if both server and client agree to its use, then all email address elements present in the entire EPP session will be evaluated according to the ABNF in RFC6531 that permits the use of “UTF8-non-ascii”. From an EPP perspective this ensures that registry and registrar data remains consistent and is the primary basis from which the consensus to publish is supported. The outstanding concern approaches the problem from an email perspective and in particular recalls the long and challenging discussions in various email working groups that have evolved our email standards to support non-ASCII email addresses. Simply put, the concern is as follows: If a non-ASCII email address is to be supported, there should be provision – as part of this change – for an all-ASCII alternative to be provided. The EPP protocol and the registration process it supports is fully satisfied by the changes proposed in this document. From an email perspective, the question being asked is if those who would access and use the data are satisfied by this change? Is the change being proposed aligned with IETF email standards? The consensus of the Working Group is that these questions are not in scope. There will be time on the REGEXT agenda tomorrow, Tuesday, 25 July 2023, to add any clarifying comments from the Working Group and for our Area Director to comment. Thanks to all, Jim _______________________________________________ regext mailing list regext@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/regext
