Minutes of 1/21 editorial teleconference...

Larry Masinter, Jim Gettys, Paul Leach, Jeff Mogul, Henrik Frysyk, and Scott 
Lawrence joined the call.  We're going back on a weekly telephone schedule to
try to get this wrapped up soon.

As always, the updated issues list is found at:
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/Issues/

#AUTH-INFO-SYNTAX has been quiet on the mailing list, and we didn't
get to discussing it at today's meeting.  Please look at it and comment.

#DIGEST-PROBS has been quiet on the mailing list, and we didn't
get to discussing it at today's meeting.  Please look at it and comment.

#CONTENT-LENGTH has been reclassified to a technical issue from editorial; 
there is a contradiction in the spec that needs clarification, and hopefully, 
clarifying this will also unconfuse a number of working group members who've 
been confused as a result. It is important we get this right... Jeff and 
Henrik are working on language here.

#MULTIPART has been created; the spec is not clear as the interrelationship 
of MIME multipart being transported and/or cached by HTTP.  Roy Fielding 
has volunteered to try to draft language to clarify this (after Feb. 1, 
as he has a different deadline then).  Our thanks to him.

#MULTIPLE-CONTENT-LOCATION has been closed; the MHTML group is looking at
other solutions.

#DIGEST-MESS is still a mess, though some light is visible; there is
consensus that we must get it implemented and get passwords in
the clear off the net. Larry Masinter and Paul Leach are putting
together another draft to get out soon (hopefully next week), reflecting
all the mailing list action.

#CONTENT-BASE Content-Base will be removed from the next draft (02).  Without 
a feature mechanism and some required extension mechanism, we don't believe 
it is recoverable; solutions would be analogous to the problems we had with 
making transfer encoding work, and the payoff isn't worth that level of 
trouble; better to solve the extensibility mess right and then deal with 
it.  Sigh...

#IPV6-ADDR-URLS has been closed; solutions to it belong in the URI syntax
document, which is a different group, and being driven independently of
HTTP, so the HTTP working group should not worry about it.  Not to mention
the IPV6 community hasn't ever actually raised the issue with us.

#DIGEST-SCALING has been subsumed by Digest mess, and whether the change
required to be able to scale up will happen may hinge on whether incompatible
changes have to happen in Digest, which might force digest to recycle at
proposed.  (This is not the end of the world, however, if it had to, in
my humble opinion; what is important is to get something implemented and
out there sooner rather than later; don't get hung up worrying about
process stuff; Larry and I will handle the details...).

I've been working hard on the next draft (rev-02), at least as hard as I 
can with a cold and a disk drive dying on the system I do the editing on.  
Most of the editorial grunt work has been completed that will be required 
to get the document to draft standard, so I'm hoping the next draft could 
concievably (though not likely) go to draft standard, if we can close out 
issues faster than new ones arise and I catch up with the moving target 
soon.  If not, I'll put out an interim draft in a couple weeks (I'd like 
to avoid it if I can; it costs me about a day of work to get one done and 
submitted; I was too hurried the last time, and the TOC and index suffered 
as a result.) Experience shows there is always at least one more draft than 
you hope for...

The editorial work completed includes a section on changes since RFC 2068, 
work on cleaning up and improving the index, instructions to IANA and a 
number of other issues and I'm continuing work on the few remaining editorial 
issues. Editorial issues that require changes to BNF, normative language, 
or which I'm not completely sure I'll get right I send mail to the mailing 
list, so you can complain at me. I still have to finish going through the 
my folder since IETF to make sure none have been dropped on the floor.

As always, let me know of what issues you believe should exist.
		- Jim Gettys




--
Jim Gettys
Industry Standards and Consortia
Digital Equipment Corporation
Visting Scientist, World Wide Web Consortium, M.I.T.
http://www.w3.org/People/Gettys/
jg@w3.org, jg@pa.dec.com

Received on Wednesday, 21 January 1998 13:22:48 UTC