On 16-apr-2007, at 12:51, <michael.dillon@bt.com> <michael.dillon@bt.com> wrote:
In the 21st century, you look at what is available on the shelf and widely in use on the net and adopt that. Most often this turns out to be a RESTful API that doesn't even need XML, although something like XML-RPC still fits the bill. I still wonder why the widely used LDAP protocol can't be adopted for whois lookups since it is used everywhere in the corporate world. The answer seems to be Not-Invented-Here or "we're netheads and LDAP smells of bellheads", both of which are ridiculous arguments in the today's world.
Come on, let's not get carried away. The problem with the IANA file is that "reserved" is ambiguous and there are other things in there that get in the way of easy parsing. This is easy enough to fix. Geoff Huston wrote a draft suggesting how to do it. Whois, LDAP and other stuff like that only makes things worse because this requires you to walk through the data rather than have it available in a nice, easy to handle text file.