Experimental by design: the Informational position and protocol humility

Reading the Draft · No. 8 (closing) · Source: draft-li-rttp-iqa-addressing-00 Abstract / §3 / §9 · Sister pillars: rttp:// (CRI 27) · iqa:// (CRI 28)

The merged document opens with a rare confession: "This document is not an Internet Standard. It is an Informational specification of two experimental addressing schemes, published for the public record." A reader is entitled to press: if you are seriously pursuing registration (rttp already holds CRI 27; iqa is on the registry), why self-demote to experimental? The answer lives in a passage of Section 3 that is the design charter of the whole document: "The model is deliberately minimal: no discovery mechanism, no transport, no key directory, no authorisation decision, and no registry of any kind is defined. What is defined is the grammar, the derivation, and the minimum client behaviour that make the two schemes safe to embed."

That is not rhetorical modesty; it is where completeness comes from. A protocol's completeness lies not in how much it defines, but in how clearly it knows what is not its to define. Addressing handles WHERE+WHEN; the attestation algorithm lives in the reference specification; transport is left to the existing network; authorisation decisions are left to local policy — every layer has a named neighbor. Defining across layers is how experimental schemes typically die: trying to govern everything, governing nothing deeply.

The Informational position also answers another obligatory question: how do these two schemes coexist with the existing ecosystem? By parallel, not replacement — the URI registry holds over four hundred schemes, each with its purpose, and rttp and iqa take nothing from anyone: no host resolution (no competition with DNS), no credential carriage (none with authentication systems), no transport definition (none with HTTP). Section 1's wording is exact — "published for the public record." We pursue registration to give this addressing model a citable, interoperable formal identity, not to claim any standards status.

Provisional status works the same way: not a temporary seat before some finish line, but the legitimate standing of an experimental scheme under the RFC 7595 framework — register first, use first, and let real deployments decide whether it rises. The lease doctrine we wrote into the protocol applies to the specification itself: standing is earned, not conferred.

The eight-piece series closes here: the security ledger of sixteen bytes; the correctness of a unique spelling; the boundary between parsing and attestation; the 120-second lease; the off-axis epoch anchor; the boundary of one document, two schemes; the three client disciplines; and this confession of experimentalism. Every quotation is taken verbatim from draft-li-rttp-iqa-addressing-00 — the document is online; line-by-line reading is welcome.

One line: protocol humility is not retreat — it is letting each layer do only what it does best; a protocol that knows its own boundary is the only kind entitled to be called complete.