- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 00:52:52 -0800
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- Cc: Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>, Eliot Lear <lear@cisco.com>, HTTP Working Group <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
On Nov 15, 2013, at 12:38 AM, Julian Reschke wrote: >> Probably that Roy's right. After all, if this is a specific value >> then it makes sense to warn the developer about the fact he might >> need to read the man or use strcmp(!). > > But this is true for parsing Content-Length as well, for instance. Do we need to state it there as well? Oh, hell no ... we are only doing this for backwards compatibility with a silly magic number that should never have been discussed in the first place. Protocols should never tell people how to program. The sole purpose of the original text was to avoid overflows being treated as negative numbers during Age calculations, and a sane description would have simply said that (as did Jeff's original draft). A specific number was suggested by committee, over-specification commenced, and then it was rearranged into a generic section for delta-seconds. Murphy's law at work. ....Roy
Received on Friday, 15 November 2013 08:53:15 UTC