Re: ISSUE PROXY-AUTHORIZATION: Proposal wording

David W. Morris:
>
[...]
>I guess you wouldn't want a creative proxy which would re-write
>BASIC authentication into digest authentication either?

I don't want proxies to be `creative'.  I think that HTTP/1.x should
not allow creative proxies, and am against weakening MUSTs to allow
such creativity.

If you want a new creative service in a proxy, call it a HTTP/1.1
proxy which implements the `creative-authentication-rewrite' protocol
extension on top of HTTP/1.1.  The use of creative extensions can be
negotiated either in-band or out-of-band.

>  Renaming
>a program to be a user-agent or client because it doesn't follow an
>arbitrary rule doesn't accomplish anything in terms of trust, etc.

Protocol specifications do not have a concept of `arbitrary rules'
which can be ignored without losing conformance.

This is all about the allocation of blame.  If you put up a proxy, for
which you claim that it is a pure 1.1 implementation, while the thing
actually ignores some `arbitrary rules', and things go wrong because a
user acted on your claim of this being a pure 1.1 proxy, then some of
the blame will be allocated at your end.

Koen.