Issue: MAN_RESPONSE - Proposed wording

Change section 4 to say:

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This proposal introduces two types of extension declaration strength:
mandatory and optional, declarations and two types of  extension
declaration scope: hop-by-hop and end-to-end (see section 4.1 and 4.2).

A mandatory extension declaration indicates that the ultimate recipient
MUST consult and adhere to the rules given by the extension when processing
the message or report an error (see section 5 and 6).

An optional extension declaration indicates that the ultimate recipient of
the extension MAY consult and adhere to the rules given by the extension
when processing the message, or ignore the extension declaration
completely. An agent may not be able to distinguish whether the ultimate
recipient does not understand an extension referred to by an optional
extension or simply ignores the extension declaration.

The combination of the declaration strength and scope defines a 2x2 matrix
which is distinguished by four new general HTTP header fields: Man, Opt,
C-Man, and C-Opt (see section 4.1 and 4.2, and appendix  12 for a table of
interactions with origin servers and proxies).

The header fields are general header fields as they describe which
extensions actually are applied to an  HTTP message. Optional declarations
can be applied to any HTTP message without any change to existing HTTP
semantics. Mandatory declarations can be applied to a request message as
described in section 5 and to a response message as described in section 6.

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And add section 6 saying:

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6. Mandatory HTTP Responses

Mandatory extension declarations in HTTP responses are often a result of
but not limited to Mandatory HTTP requests. A server MAY use mandatory
extension declarations in response to a non-Mandatory HTTP request. This is
primarily intended to facilitate extensions that can not be understood
without using the extension or are authorized out-of-band.

If a client receives an HTTP response which contains a Mandatory extension
declaration which it does not understand or does not want to use, it SHOULD
treat it as if the message was of type "application/octet-stream".

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--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk

Received on Wednesday, 11 March 1998 20:04:10 UTC