[ARIN-consult] Automated templates

[Owen DeLong]

On Dec 19, 2008, at 1:20 PM, <michael.dillon at bt.com> wrote:

>> I really don't see a need to make this overly complicated
>> with XML when for what ARIN templates require a simple
>> attribute/value pairing and
>> RFC-822 style plain text is quite adequate to the task.
>>
>> attribute: value
>>
>> What more do we need?
>
> How do you correctly represent the name of one of Canada's
> two largest cities, Montréal in plain text? I suppose
> you could use some non-ASCII encoding, but which one?
> XML solves that and a host of other parsing problems.
> The toolkits that people use to build REST clients
> and servers already have XML handling baked into them.
> No need to worry about whether or not a comma will cause
> things to go into the wrong db field.
>
Actually, there is a LATIN-1 ASCII encoding which includes
all the characters necessary to represent any of the
city names in the region that I am aware of.

While I don't want to be culturally insensitive, the reality is
that today, the WHOIS and other ARIN databases use
Montreal to represent the name of the city and I am not
aware of any substantial portion of the ARIN constituency
finding tremendous fault with that representation.

> Since the API under discussion is about communication
> between a client application and a server application,
> there is nothing simple about RFC 822 format and it
> is not adequate to the task. Let's face it, nowadays
> XML is COTS (Common Off-The-Shelf) technology, and
> wrestling with RFC 822 objects is uncommon, and generally
> requires customized coding.
>
Some templates will be automated, some will be hand
generated. Having one parser that can automate the
handling of both circumstances is, in my opinion,
desirable.  Having a human-readable template format
that can be used for error reporting and human-based
corrected resubmission is also desirable.

RFC822 parsing is pretty simple, and, there are toolkits
for it available in PERL, Python, and several other
languages.

RFC822 attribute-value pairs are commonly used in
one of your favorite tools, afterall... LDIF uses an
RFC822 style attribute-value pairing syntax.

Owen