A well-defined and widely implemented query language to large volumes of data organized into tables does, in fact, exist. It is called SQL. I guess all that whois silliness is an acute case of NIH syndrome. --vadim On Sat, 20 Oct 2001, Joe Abley wrote:
On Sat, Oct 20, 2001 at 01:53:04PM +0200, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Joe Abley wrote:
There is no standard specified in the RFC for output, just for query language.
Is RFC954 a standard in any real sense? Seems to me that the RFC2026 designation for that document would be "Historic", although RFC954 is old enough that it is not labelled with a maturity level.
Well, the process is standardizes is so simple and flexible there obviously hasn't been any need to change the past 16 years:
The original comment was that the *query language* is standardised. RFC954 digresses beyond the trivial protocol you mentioned to specify lookup behaviour which is, in practice, entirely implementation-specific.
production *IR/IRR/registry/registrar whois servers is (a) that they all let you look stuff up, and (b) they all listen on 43/tcp.
Isn't trying to standardize the output of whois servers is like trying to standardize the output of HTTP servers? Since this output is for human consumtion (well, after HTML parsing in the case of HTTP) standardizing has very few benefits.
s/Since/If/
Scripts consume the output of whois servers, too. Ask abuse@$isp (and witness the energy that went into RIPE-181 and later RPSL to make the results of queries parsable).
Joe