- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Wed, 23 Jul 97 14:03:57 MDT
- To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Martin J. Duerst writes:
A lot of what is written above turns up exactly the same in
Accept-Charset, Accept-Language, and so on. In many cases, there
is something special, but not too much. Is there a way to organize
the text different? This would hopefully a) save space, b) help
getting an overview, and c) make things more consistent.
I thought about doing that, but decided against it for several
reasons:
(1) I wanted to minimize the risk that any changes I proposed
would create new problems for the other Accept-* headers.
By not changing any of those sections, I hope I didn't break
them!
(2) I'm don't really know the history behind the current
wordings for Accept, Accept-Charset, and Accept-Language;
I do know that each one is subtly different, and so trying
to unify the descriptions might either require a lot of
special cases, or it may break things that people depend
on.
(3) Time is short, and the most important thing at this
point is to get the actual protocol specification frozen
ASAP. I.e., the BNF and semantics for these headers.
If at some (not TOO distant) point in the future, someone
wants to try to rewrite the description here, without
changing the meaning, I'm sure that would be a much easier
process than actually changing the BNF or semantics.
Bottom line: if anyone thinks you know how to reorganize the text
of the Accept-* headers, to make it simpler and more uniform,
but without changing the BNF or semantics, by all means go ahead
and do so. But probably this will have to wait until after the
Munich IETF, since we already have too much work to do before
the July 30 I-D submission deadline.
-Jeff
Received on Wednesday, 23 July 1997 14:13:29 UTC