Re: Why is From: limited?

At 11:15 AM 3/23/95, Roman Czyborra wrote:
>I've got two questions regarding 5.4.6 From
>
>1. Why is From: only a request header?  It would be nice to provide
>   the address of the file owner so you know where to send comments
>   if the author forgot to add a <LINK REV="made" HREF="mailto:...">

Sure, it'd be nice. It's probably impossible to implement in an efficient
fashion on most servers today. It means that server implementors will have
to add yet another config file that specifies the author of every single
document being served by their server, just so the From: line can be filled
in in a HTTP response header. This isn't practical and is the reason why
people put their address info at the bottom of HTML documents when they
want to be contacted.

There are plenty of times when the author of a document has no desire to be
contacted by millions of people on the net. This is the same reason that
From: no longer sends the e-mail address of users when clients make
requests. People want their anonymity and building big brother features
into HTTP, even though they may be convenient, are probably inappropriate.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Shotton
cshotton@biap.com                                  http://www.biap.com/
cshotton@oac.hsc.uth.tmc.edu                           "I am NOT here."

Received on Thursday, 23 March 1995 06:32:50 UTC