Re: First reactions to mandatory draft
From: Scott Lawrence (lawrence@agranat.com)
Date: Tue, Jan 20 1998
Message-Id: <199801202119.QAA03325@devnix.agranat.com>
To: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
cc: ietf-http-ext@w3.org
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 1998 16:19:55 -0500
From: "Scott Lawrence" <lawrence@agranat.com>
Subject: Re: First reactions to mandatory draft
>>>>> "JM" == Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com> writes:
JM> On the other hand, it's not clear to me that an extension-aware
JM> HTTP implementation should be discarding headers as "unrecognized"
JM> before it has parsed them all. [...]
JM> Consider another, perfectly legal example:
JM> GET /foo.html HTTP/1.1
JM> Accept-Language: en;q=0.9
JM> Host: bar.com
JM> Accept-Language: fr;q=0.5
JM> User-Agent: Count Chocula
JM> Accept-Language: en-us;q=0.7
JM> I don't see how you can properly parse the Accept-Language
JM> field without at least some buffering. (Not "back-tracking",
JM> but "buffering.")
But that is not the same case - Accept-Language is not an
unrecognized header, and in event, the server doesn't need to buffer
the header itself, just the header value - and can fold the values
from multiple instances of the header.
What I believe is needed is a way for the sender to say 'In order to
correctly interpret this message you must understand this set of
extentions'. I don't think that the prefix mechanism is needed to
say that.
--
Scott Lawrence EmWeb Embedded Server <lawrence@agranat.com>
Agranat Systems, Inc. Engineering http://www.agranat.com/