Legal Interaction Protocol design principles

Protocols worthy of study and potentially of emulation:

Net News Transport Protocol, NNTP

NNTP gives each reader a complete composite picture (the present state of a newsgroup), bringing together many independent submissions (articles) each of which has been authored independently, and submitted to the system through a different path. We can never know whether we're seeing a "complete" view, but we do need a way of knowing whether the view we're seeing is the most up-to-date view that we know of.

Simple Network Management Protocol, SNMP

SNMP provides an extensible framework of Management Information Bases, MIBs, each of which is, in effect, a descriptor for a database record type. MIBs may be independently authored, and may be used privately or publicly. They are each uniquely identified through a hierarchical numbering scheme. Each data record identifies the MIB which may be used to decode it.

Multipart Internet Mail Extensions, MIME

MIME is an encoding used in email and web documents to differentiate multiple independent and heterogenous pieces of content that, taken together, constitute a complete message.