Status and Consensus on Host

I am currently attempting to merge-in the acceptable changes out
of the 80 comments I received the night before HTTP/1.0 was supposed
to be submitted to the IESG.  None of the changes are substantive
and there will be no change to the protocol -- however, the editorial
changes are quite extensive and will result in one hell of a diff.

At the same time, I am returning to UC Irvine on Friday and am trying
to get my things together before I leave (hoping that I don't leave
something behind, like my sanity).  Thus, I won't be able to produce
a new draft until sometime next week, depending on the ruckus that
is waiting for me on my return.  Assuming I don't make any mistakes
in transition, the new draft will then be submitted to the IESG.

HTTP/1.1 is stalled for the same reason, though at least it will benefit
from the changes as well.  Trying to edit two FrameMaker documents in
parallel is a good way to go snow-blind, and I'll be very happy once
1.0 is out of my hands.  At the current time, the two drafts are being
kept in perfect synchrony, which in this case means synchronous lack
of progress.

If I am extremely lucky, I'll get the 1.0 changes done on Thursday and
produce a PostScript version by Friday morning.  Sorry for the pessimism,
but its been a while since I've been lucky.  HTTP/1.1 is currently 70
pages long and does not yet reflect the current status of the features
(i.e., if I gave out a copy right now, everybody would scream at me
for leaving a bunch of stuff in/out that I promised to have done, and a
whole bunch of people would go off and try to implement stuff that
I already know cannot be implemented correctly).

On the other hand, it seems that the WG has reached rough consensus
on defining the 

    Host: fully.qualified.domain.name

as the method for telling the server what hostname is being accessed
even when there are multiple hostnames per IP address.  It will be
a required header on all HTTP/1.1 requests, and I encourage everyone
to go out and implement it on HTTP/1.0 clients.  There are already
three implementations that I know of, and I expect it to be in all
the current browser releases by the end of the year.

Once a critical mass of clients have implemented Host, servers will
be able to add the multihome features as well.

Happy camping,

 ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
                      Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
                      (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)

Received on Wednesday, 27 September 1995 15:24:27 UTC