[43630] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: whois syntax
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Sat Oct 20 08:15:03 2001
Date: Sat, 20 Oct 2001 08:14:28 -0400
From: Joe Abley <jabley@automagic.org>
To: Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
Message-ID: <20011020081428.Z92370@buffoon.automagic.org>
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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
