RFC 5064 Archived-At

Great, RFC 5064 about the Archived-At mail and news message header field got its number, just in time to consider this as an early xmas gift ;-)

Fresh opensearch & google gadgets

New Opensearch descriptions:

1. Google Code custom search
2. en×de translations by LEO
3. es×de translations by LEO
4. fr×de translations by LEO

New googlets:

5. About Flash googlet (version, links, search)
6. Atomic clock googlet (JAVA applet of the PTB)
7. Tiny map search googlet (local search)

The tiny map location can be set, default 53.55, 9.99.

RFC errata

Various pending RFC errata have been published recently, among others for RFC 2069, 2822, and 4408. The RFC editor might soon offer a Web form for submissions as outlined in an Internet Draft.

• The 2069 erratum resulted in an editorial update of my MD5 test suite.
• The 2822 erratum was already covered in the 2822upd drafts.
• The 4408 erratum is actually a link to the OpenSPF errata page.

Sorbian and Frisian use the Latin script

The language subtag registry defined in BCP 47 was updated, it now contains the new region codes BL & MF and Suppress-Script: Latn for the Frisian languages frr, frs, and fy, for the Sorbian languages dsb and hsb, and for the Low and Swiss German languages nds and gsw.

The mis entry was updated some months ago in ISO 639, its description is now uncoded languages. I've created new experimental XML versions of the registry, for other formats check out the Language Tags site.

Lever dood as slaav ;-)

ABNF, Archived-At, News, and NNTP

RFC 4234bis was approved, we'll soon see a new Internet Standard (STD) about ABNF, the syntax used in many RFCs. An RFC defining the Archived-At header field in e-mail and news was approved earlier while I was in essence incommunicado after a system crash... :-(

I've submitted new versions of the news and nntp URI draft, adding an appendix with a detailed example about the relations between Archived-At, Message-ID, Xref, news-, and nntp-URLs. Two typos in version 06 fixed, this draft reached a point where it's easier to spoil it than to improve it.

Broken validators

Popular validators like the WDG and the W3C validator unfortunately still accept various kinds of broken URIs not limited to unencoded IRIs as "valid". For the W3C validator that's a known bug.

Admittedly it's almost impossible to fix this bug based on a DTD, renaming %URI; as in the related XML schema anyURI to %IRI; in the DTD has the same effect as renaming it to %FOO; for DTD-validators, the datatype is still CDATA, or in other words (almost) anything goes.

Hopefully even DTD-validators will be fixed really soon to check URIs. Broken URLs are abused for attacks, ironically that was a side effect of better URI tests, several applications failed to check the generic RFC 3986 syntax. All valid URIs match this generic syntax, scheme specific URIs are proper subsets of the generic syntax. URI "producers" including MediaWiki as well as URI "consumers" including validators have to get this right, otherwise bad things happen.

The folks at validome hope that they'll get this right soon, schema validators have an advantage. They already identify the IDNwiki and its E-mail test as invalid, big oops for accessibility tests (IANAL).

Update: The IDNwiki pages were fixed 2007-11-21.

New TLDs BL, MF, and TEL

Version 2.1 of rxwhois knows the new TLDs BL, MF, and TEL. The corresponding whois servers are not yet running, but whois.iana.org already supports these TLDs. The corresponding region codes BL and MF will be added to the IANA language subtag registry in the next weeks.

Now rxwhois also supports the eleven IDN test domains. The test started 2007-10-15, but it took me until yesterday to fix a stupid bug.

The worst issue so far from my POV is that popular XHTML validators like the W3C validator don't check the URL syntax in attributes like href="URI", see bug 4916. Many users will be misled to create invalid pages with "unencoded" IRIs in document types like HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, where that's not allowed.

RFC 2617 vs. 2831 md5-sess

Good news first, RFC 4590bis (approved, still waiting for its number) will fix the Digest-MD5 examples in RFC 4590. I've updated the MD5 test suite using the fixed examples.

While I was at it I've also updated the RFC 3797 code to work for the NOMCOM 2007 case. The entropy limit 30 was too restrictive, 38 is good enough for MD5, 10^38 < 2^128.

Now the bad news, the issue with two md5-sess examples in draft smith-sipping-auth-examples might be in fact precisely what RFC 2617 says, as reported in a semi-official erratum. If that's correct the md5-sess in RFC 2831 would be different. Hopefully draft melnikov-digest-to-historic will shed some light on this before it moves RFC 2831 to historic. For more about this see the IETF SASL WG mailing list.

For now the MD5 test suite still uses only the binary x2c(HA1) form instead of the hex. HA1 form in its md5-sess calculation.

HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML i18n//EN"

Admittedly RFC 2070 is old, and its status is historic. But it was the first HTML specification with I18N based on UNICODE, and the last HTML specification published by the IETF.

So far its DTD had to be extracted manually from the RFC, now IANA hosts an official master copy with the public identifier urn:ietf:params:xml:pi:-:IETF:DTD+HTML+i18N:EN. The urn:ietf:params:xml:pi registry was created by RFC 3688 for DTDs developed by the IETF. Of course HTML i18n is still SGML, not XML, but its DTD is now the first registered IETF DTD.

If you have old HTML i18n documents you can use an URL of this DTD as system identifier like this:

<DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML i18n//EN" "http://www.iana.org/assignments/xml-registry/publicid/html2070.dtd">