Re: Brief mtg. summary

> - Create a list which collates the "key functionality" among
>   AOLpress/AOLserver, FrontPage, Word, as well as other distributed
>   authoring tools. Dave Long, America Online, is the editor of this
>   document.

> The general sentiment is that while this document would still be
> useful to produce, its main purpose was to motivate the generation
> of requirements, which has already occurred without having this
> information.  Dave Long is still willing to accept contributions
> and edit them.  However, this activity is currently low priority.

I thought the main idea was to not only find the "key functionality"
but also to survey the implementation methods, by which this
functionality has already been implemented.

It's always better to start with something that someone has already
implemented (and in these cases, are already shipping) than to invent
something new!

> - There should be an investigation by the versioning and configuration
>   management group into the utility of entity tags (etags) for
>   performing versioning.

This is a little puzzling. Entity tags were an invention of the HTTP
working group caching subgroup. I don't think there is any
"information" to "collect". Rather, there's been some speculation that
some of the requirements for referencing specific versions could be
met by a design that used a (new) request header to designate a
version, and an entity tag to distinguish versions. From the point of
view of HTTP/1.1, "version" is just another kind of request header
that content might vary on, using the standard content negotiation
tags.

This is a conjecture. The only thing to do now is to test the
conjecture against the requirements for version referencing.

All in all, it sounds like you had a productive meeting, and I wish
I'd been there. I'm looking forward to seeing the documents that
result. See you in November.

Larry

Received on Saturday, 21 September 1996 03:46:12 UTC