HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Tue, 09 Apr 2002 10:07:05 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) Last-Modified: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 00:17:00 GMT ETag: "361eae-1694-329cd9fc" Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 5780 Connection: close Content-Type: text/plain INTERNET-DRAFT S. Williamson draft-mealling-rwhoisurl-00.txt M. Mealling Expires June 5, 1996 Network Solutions, Inc. The RWhois Uniform Resource Locator Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet-Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as work in progress. To learn the current status of any Internet-Draft, please check the 1id-abstracts.txt listing contained in the Internet-Drafts Shadow Directories on ds.internic.net (US East Coast), nic.nordu.net (Europe), ftp.isi.edu (US West Coast), or munnari.oz.au (Pacific Rim). 1. Abstract RWhois is an Internet directory access protocol that is defined in RFC1714[1]. This document describes a format for an RWhois Uniform Resource Locator that will allow Internet clients to have direct access to the RWhois protocol. An RWhois URL will represent a single query to an RWhois server. 2. URL Definition An RWhois URL begins with the protocol prefix "rwhois" and is defined by the following ABNF grammar. RWHOISURL = "rwhois://" [ SERVER ] "/" [ QUERY ] SERVER = 1 *DNSCHAR *["." 1*DNSCHAR] [ ":" 1..65535 ] QUERY = [ CLASS ] "?" TERMS CLASS = 1*ALPHA TERMS = a list of query terms as defined in RFC 1714 DNSCHAR = ALPHA/DIGIT/DASH ALPHA = "a".."z"/"A".."Z" DIGIT = 0..9 DASH = "-" The RWhois prefix indicates an entry or entries residing in the RWhois server running on the given hostname at the given port number as encoded in SERVER. The default port is TCP port 4321. Any URL-illegal characters (e.g., spaces) MUST be escaped using the % method described in RFC 1738. The CLASS specifies the RWhois class to which the object(s) in question belong. If the CLASS part of the URL is omitted, all data contained in the server will be searched. Please note that this may cause unintended ambiguities. Those developers encoding RWhois URLs should encode the CLASS as much as possible. Note that if the entry resides in the RWhois namespace, it should be reachable from any RWhois server in that tree. If the SERVER part of the URL is missing, it is assumed to be a local query. 3. RWhois Version 1.0 versus 1.5 Interoperability This URL is meant to work with both the 1.0 and 1.5 versions of the RWhois protocol. There are two issues that developers should be aware of when using this URL. * Output Display and Restriction Keywords In RWhois Version 1.0 an additional pre-query term could be specified that determined which values were returned to the client. These were derived from the original whois [RFC954] specification and included items like dump (#), SUMMARY ($), and FULL (=). Since a URL is used to point to the instance of the object and not its representation, the developer should determine what display type and restriction to use for his/her particular application. Thus, even though this term is considered part of the query in 1.0, it MUST NOT to be used in the URL itself. * Authority Areas Version 1.5 has a much stronger concept of authority areas. Developers should keep this in mind when encoding a particular URL so that no ambiguity is encountered for similar objects in different authority areas. 4. Examples The following are some example RWhois URLs using the format defined above. * An RWhois URL referring to the domain class objects that contain the string "network solutions", available from the local RWhois server. rwhois:///domain?network%20solutions * An RWhois URL referring to the domain class containing the string "network solutions" on a particular RWhois server. This URL corresponds to a base object search of the domain class. rwhois://netman1.netsol.com/domain?network%20solutions * An RWhois URL referring to the set of entries found by querying the local RWhois server and looking for a person with the name of "Scott Williamson". Note the % encoded quotes and space. rwhois:///person?name=%42scott%20williamson%42 5. Security Considerations The RWhois URL format does not provide a way to specify the security information to use when resolving the URL. It is expected that such requests will either be unauthenticated or that the client will be able to negotiate the security requirements. The security implications of resolving an RWhois URL are the same as those of resolving any RWhois query. See the RFC 1714 for more details. 6. Prototype Implementation Availability There is a prototype implementation available for the specification defined in this document. It is the RWhois client, provided in both source and binary forms. See for more details. 7. Bibliography [1] Williamson, S., and Kosters, M., "RWhois Protocol", RFC 1714, March 1995. [2] Berners-Lee, T., Masinter, L., and M. McCahill, "Uniform Resource Locators (URL)", RFC 1738, December 1994. 8. Authors' Addresses Scott Williamson Michael Mealling 505 Huntmar Park Dr. 505 Huntmar Park Dr. Herndon, VA 22070 Herndon, VA 22070 Phone: (703) 742-4820 Phone: (770) 491-1379 email: scottw@rwhois.net email: michaelm@rwhois.net