RE: First reactions to mandatory draft

> ----------
> From: 	Scott Lawrence[SMTP:lawrence@agranat.com]
> Sent: 	Tuesday, January 20, 1998 12:43 PM
> To: 	Paul Leach
> Cc: 	ietf-http-ext@w3.org
> Subject: 	Re: First reactions to mandatory draft
> 
>   Is the goal of the draft to specify how to require the use of a
>   particular extention, or is it to specify how to do dynamically
>   loaded extentions?
> 
>   The former is important, the latter is an interesting academic
>   exercise.
> 
I agree. I only care about the former. Concern about the latter has
prevented even a simple mechanism from getting done in a timely fashion.

> PL> I always thought it was obvious that the Man header was required
> PL> to come _ahead_ of any uses -- but I can't recall if the spec
> PL> _says_ that.
> 
>   I didn't see it, but even if it did I don't think that there is any
>   requirement that proxies preserve header field order so you can't
>   count on it.
> 
Yucch. But you're right. Are there actually any proxies that do reorder the
header fields? We could make it be a requirement (in the Mandatory draft)
that any proxy that reorders headers instead reject requests containing
Mandatory. Or, if there aren't any proxies today that reorder, we could
require that origin servers reject requests that have the prefixed headers
ahead of the declaration of the namespace. That should be lots easier than
the backtracking thing otherwise required.

> PL> 23-Skidoo and 65-SKidoo are _not_ the same header, so they shouldn't
> be
> PL> folded.
> 
>   They are for CGI purposes after the prefixes have been removed (or
>   are we going to require that CGIs also understand prefixes?).
> 
Of course. How else would you do it? The headers could be changed so that
they were independent of the prefix (change the numeric prefix to the URL of
the extension, e.g.), but the two uses of the same suffix need to be
disambiguated somehow.

Paul

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 1998 16:52:32 UTC