Re: PROPOSAL: i99 Pipelining Problems

On 07/04/2008, at 6:19 PM, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:
> Comments aiding implementers in how to deal with the current mess of
> clearly broken and non-compliant implementations is best placed in a
> separate informal document outside the standard documenting known bugs
> and how to deal with them. The focus in the standard text itself  
> should
> be longterm interoperability. These implementations is very likely to
> decline over time, and having such comments in the standard text  
> itself
> only adds confusion.

There's that document again. Any volunteers to edit it?


> So far there is no evidence that the amount of broken  
> implementations is
> so high that implementing pipelining isn't possible or useful. In  
> fact I
> would say the opposite has already been proved in the wild with  
> several
> non-browser applications making very successful use of pipelining.

I don't agree. AIUI those non-browser applications have been  
successful because pipelining has been used under controlled  
conditions; i.e., with a known workload, and a limited pool of  
implementations.

Perhaps my proposal wasn't focused on the right aspect of interop;  
broken implementations are part of the problem, but the other is the  
nature of pipelining itself (e.g., forcing complexity and uncertainty  
on the client WRT what the optimal use of pipelining is). Would you be  
comfortable adding text like that?


> It's
> true that enabling pipelinng is hard for the major browser vendors as
> their users expect them to deal with pretty much every crappy server  
> out
> there no matter how broken it is, but thats a position they have  
> placed
> themselves in.  I would be very glad the day the major browsers  
> started
> to actually alert the user when a broken server is detected instead of
> just silently work around it, placing some pressure on getting servers
> fixed.


Lots of people argued for something to be said about pipelining in  
previous threads; this proposal is the end result, although it's  
pretty watered down. I'd like to hear from those who put in their .02  
earlier; does this add any value at all, or should we just close this  
issue with no action?

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Tuesday, 8 April 2008 00:35:26 UTC