Liaison statement
Proposed URI Scheme Registration Process Changes

W3C,

The IETF is considering some changes to the URI scheme registration process
to address problems documented in
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-appsawg-uri-scheme-reg-00.

In addition, the IETF APPSAWG discussed whether to allow for registering
scheme name prefixes (to reserve them for a specific purpose or
organization), and has tentatively decided to not make any changes in this
regard.

The changes being considered notably include the following:

1) Lowering the bar for Provisional (but not Permanent) allocation to be
First-Come-First-Served without requiring Expert Review, since today this
seems to be a disincentive for many to register and seems to result in
using Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme) or
http://www.w3.org/wiki/UriSchemes to claim or look up scheme names instead
of the IANA registry.

2) Reserving the use of dots in new scheme names to indicate that they are
constructed from a domain name suffix (as already allowed in RFC 4395).
This avoids conflicts such as could occur today were ".iris" or ".soap"
allocated as gTLDs for instance.

Please let us know if there are concerns with these changes that the IETF
needs to take into account.

M. Kucherawy
Co-chair, Applications Area Working Group