Design approach to MASS (was Re: [ietf-dkim] On per-user-keying)

[Earl Hood]

On August 10, 2005 at 13:40, Eric Allman wrote:

> If anything, DKIM is 1+2.  I agree that the binding for dns-based key 
> management could be pulled out into another document.  It seemed to 
> me at the time that this wasn't necessary.  For example, RFC2046 
> defines both the text MIME type and text/plain subtype; the failure 
> to have them in separate documents hasn't prevented the addition of 
> new text subtypes.  But other than creating more work for authors and 
> making it a bit harder for readers to find all the correct documents, 
> I don't see any damage in it either.
> 
> Is the wording of the current draft insufficiently clear about the 
> ability to extend these fields?

I think things can be clearer, and the restructuring of the
document to clearly separate components can be done.  I have made
suggestions on what can be done in past posts (to ietf-mailsig),
but failed to get any feedback that the suggestions were useful.

See
<http://www.mhonarc.org/archive/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=ietf-mailsig&i=200507310535.j6V5ZFK07537%40gator.earlhood.com>
for an example.

A simple thing like restructuring and rewording the document helps
one make sure that what is being specified does not contain unneeded,
and unwarrented, dependencies.

--ewh