Re: First reactions to mandatory draft

At 14:06 1/22/98 PST, Jeffrey Mogul wrote:

>  Where 'Scooby: dooby' was defined by RFC4000 and the 'doo'
>  extention was defined by RFC4100.  What I want to express is that
>  you should reject the request unless you understand RFC4100, not
>  that you understand some older version of the Scooby header.  So I
>  would add:
>
>    Man: http://ietf.org/rfcs/rfc4100.txt

This would only be necessary if the Scooby header had been registered in
IANA multiple times as different versions with different semantics. I guess
this could happen - the redifinition of the Accept-Encoding header field
could count as different versions, for example.

Otherwise,

	Man: Scoopy

would indeed point to the header field registered by IANA and nothing else.

>Somewhat verbose, alas, but a little more compact than a URL,
>and perhaps more robust.

URIs should always be made as persistent as the objects they point to,
which is independent of the syntax.

>Note that this is still not quite enough, unless we make a
>rule that this means "unconditional compliance" to the referenced
>RFC.  Which is not such a big deal; if RFC4100 has some SHOULDs
>as well as MUSTs, then one can write RFC4101, describing a
>particular profile of requirements from RFC4100, and then use
>urn:ietf:RFC:4101 instead.

Yes indeed - I would imagine that RDF (Resource description Framework) [1]
will be used to describe exactly which features are supported by a
particular name.

Henrik

[1] http://www.w3.org/RDF/
--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk

Received on Thursday, 22 January 1998 17:40:05 UTC