RE: First reactions to mandatory draft

One effect of Koen's suggestion is to make a simple thing even more
complicated.  The simple thing is what Yoran wants -- a new _registered_
header name which must be understood by the server or rejected.

I would suggest something like this:

Man:	Registered-Header1, Reg-Hedr2, 23-, 35-
Extension: URL1; ns=23, URL2; ns=35

For registered header, no "Extension:" is needed. The only complication in
Man over what is required for simple mandatory registered headers is that
"23-" is a prefix, not an exact match whole header. The concession to
decentralized extensibility is that "Extension" does not have to be listed
in the Man header.

> ----------
> From: 	koen@win.tue.nl[SMTP:koen@win.tue.nl]
> Sent: 	Thursday, January 22, 1998 10:43 AM
> To: 	frystyk@w3.org
> Cc: 	lawrence@agranat.com; Paul Leach; ietf-http-ext@w3.org
> Subject: 	Re: First reactions to mandatory draft
> 
> Henrik Frystyk Nielsen:
> >
> [...]
> >This is an unavoidable problem when multiple extensions share a single,
> >global header field space and no central registry can hinder this. The
> >alternative is to pass all extension information as parameters:
> >
> >	M-GET / HTTP/1.1
> >	Host: foobar
> >	Man: "http://screwball.org/skidoo.html"; Skidoo=abc,
> >	     "http://nutcase.org/skidoo.html"; Skidoo=def
> >
> >which avoids the problem altogether.
> 
> I highly prefer this alternative of passing all extension info as
> parameters in the Man header.  Dynamically allocating collision-free
> headers is so difficult that is is not worth the trouble (see my
> comments on an earlier PEP draft for a discussion).  Why add a
> complicated indirection layer if you do not need one?
> 
> If people really want headers, the draft can tell them to register
> them in the upcoming IANA header registry.
> 
> >Henrik
> 
> Koen.
>

Received on Thursday, 22 January 1998 15:11:51 UTC