The historic reason for X- is it used to take IANA months to register a protocol parameter. The more recent (early 2000’s) reason for X- is the IETF in its infinite wisdom required an Act of G-d to register something. The IETF has learned from its mistakes and allows for first-come, first-served parameter registration. See RFC 6648.
We have neither problem.
Stand up either a Wiki, GitHub repository, or, believe it or not, just ask IANA nicely for a FCFS registry, and we can have one.
I would humorously offer we say, “Custom properties SHOULD NOT start with X-, unless those characters are meaningful, as in ‘X-Reference’ for Cross Reference or ‘X-factor’ for an unknown factor."
On May 12, 2016, at 1:11 PM, John Anderson <> wrote:
That RFC is pretty clear. "X-" is so 1990s.
Why can't we have a registry? It could be as simple as a shared GitHub repository, which would have the advantage of version control. "Official" properties would probably be voted in, but it's easy enough to show the status of a property. Also, rather than spamming the list, someone could submit a Pull Request, which is much more developer-friendly and traceable.
</end 2cents>
JSA
From: <> on behalf of Wunder, John A. <>Sent: Thursday, May 12, 2016 12:37 PMTo: : [cti-stix] Custom properties
Hey everyone,
As you know, custom properties is currently moving the approval process (text: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HJqhvzO35h62gQGPvghVRIAtQrZn3_J__0UcDAj-NXY/edit#heading=h.8072zpptza86). We’ve had a couple objections, from Mark Davidson and Eric Burger, to the use of the x_ prefix. Mark pointed us to https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6648
My questions are:
- Should we proceed as is and have a ballot on the current approach?
- Should we just remove the SHOULD statement that recommends the x_ prefix?
- Should we take things back to the drawing board and talk about running a property registry as indicated by RFC 6648?
My opinion: at this point in our lifecycle as a community, we probably aren’t ready for a registry. We can use the informal process we talked about on the working call, where people can e-mail the cti-users list if there’s a property they want to make heavy use of. When we release a new version, if we want to move that to a standard we can have non-normative text deprecating the previous custom property and indicating that the new standards-based property should be used. I could go either way on keeping the SHOULD requirement for the x_ prefix, but given we’ve had strong agreement to keep it over previous calls I’m feeling like we should keep it as is.
Given that, I would like to proceed with the ballot either today or later tomorrow. Just wanted to call out this important topic though.
John
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