RE: HTTP futures workshop at WWW7

Group,

I feel very strongly that the HTTP-NG working group at WWW7 should proceed.
The main reason for my attending WWW7 is to get an idea of the direction that
the
HTTP protocol is taking.  I recently became one of the people on my webserver
development team to follow HTTP, become involved in standards groups concerning
HTTP, and implement the new specs.

FYI-The webserver is Domino Go Webserver which formally was
IBM's Internet Connection Server.

The benefits of a meeting like this will be much more substantial for myself
than those of you who have been working with HTTP and many other Internet
related ventures for years.  Many of you have so much information to offer,
please do not keep all of your experience and knowledge to yourselves.
If you say RTFM then well I have been reading so much that I am single again.
;-)

So I ask those of you who have so  much to contribute to please attend the
HTTP-NG workshop.  If for some reason some of you do not attend the workshop,
then please do not be unreachable during the conference.  As I would like
meet--to go out to dinner with--talk with--learn from  some or all of you
during the
up coming conference.

I am currently on the plane to California, and then to Sydney today ( 8 April
98 ).  So
the availability to my IBM mail in the next couple of days is undeterminable.
However,
please reply with any comments or status of the working group.

Thanks

Shane Owenby
shaneo@us.ibm.com









http-future-request@w3.org on 04/07/98 06:29:34 PM
Please respond to ejw@ics.uci.edu
To: Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com, http-future@w3.org
cc: ejw@ics.uci.edu
Subject: RE: HTTP futures workshop at WWW7

Hi Mike,

Rohit, Henrik, Roy, Henry and I discussed this topic during the LA IETF
last week, and came to the conclusion that the workshop is still very much
worth holding.

I can understand your concerns about the community of participants not
being large enough or different enough from the HTTP-NG group to have a
good discussion during the workshop, but there are several reason why I
feel the workshop is still a very good idea.

Addressing the lack of diversity concern, given that Rohit and I aren't
part of the HTTP-NG effort yet have significant views on this topic, and
since I Hugh Davis will bring a new an interesting perspective from the
Open Hypermedia community, I tend to think there will be sufficient
diversity of opinion at the workshop.  Furthermore, we expect to gather a
few latecomers to the workshop based on discussions we had at the LA IETF.

One area where I think there can be much fruitful discussion at the
workshop are the impact(s) of providing WebDAV support in HTTP-NG, since I
don't feel the HTTP-NG group has had a full DAV advocate, and our
experience with WebDAV is that there are several suboptimal choices that
are made when you "bolt-on" to a non-DAV aware protocol like HTTP/1.1.
Providing WebDAV support is far more complicated than the bullet on this
topic in the "Goals" document.  I'm currently working on my position paper
on this very subject, but support for WebDAV has far reaching effects,
including:

- support for operations which affect more than one resource (e.g., have a
source and a destination like MOVE and COPY)
- operations which operate on a hierarchy of resources
- operations which have a source and a destination and which operate over a
hierarchy (e.g., COPY hierarchy A to B)
- improved error reporting (the error could be on the source, or the
destination, or both simultaneously)
- error reporting precedence rules for handling cases where multiple
simultaneous errors can occur
- interactions between parameter encoding issues like extensibility,
internationalization and ease of rapid parsing for security issues, or
server efficiency
- strong precondition evaluation support
- caching of parts of resources, like properties
- support for searching, and a new kind of resource, the "arbiter"
- a data model which distinguishes between active (e.g., CGI, ASP, etc. and
static resources)

Many of these issues are not explicity addressed in the "Goals" document.

So, my feeling is, though the turnout is less than expected, the "right"
people are attending, and I expect the resulting discussion to be of high
quality, more than justifying the expenditure of a day.

- Jim

On Tuesday, April 07, 1998 2:16 PM, Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com
[SMTP:Mike_Spreitzer.PARC@xerox.com] wrote:
> I'm given to understand that the signups for this workshop consist mainly
of
> HTTP-NG folks and Australian on-lookers (I saw Jim's note saying Hugh
Davis
> will be there for part of the day, but this is the only exception to the
above
> rule that I'm aware of).  This leads me to doubt whether much actual work
can
> be done.  Perhaps we should disband this workshop, freeing the
participants to
> find a more productive use of the time?
>

Received on Thursday, 9 April 1998 21:35:31 UTC