Re: Summary of opinions on Negotiate header

On Wed, 25 Sep 1996, Roy T. Fielding wrote:

> > In view of these results, the next version of the conneg draft will
> > use `Negotiate: tcn' to indicate support for transparent content
> > negotiation.  If you can think of something shorter than `Negotiate:
> > tcn', please let me know.
> 
> I would prefer `Negotiate: t' myself, since the 'cn' serves no useful
> purpose given the context.  I was thinking of using `Negotiate: a'
> for pure agent-driven negotiation (without the proxy mumbo jumbo).

Anyone else *REALLY* peeved at this 'abbreviate until meaningless'
approach to header design? You might as well go whole hog - why just save
two bytes from the *value* of the when you can save 8 from the *name* of
the header? Just call it 'N: t'. :/ If you are *SERIOUS* about saving
bytes in the header - change to a machine readable format. But don't play
this game of 'this is a human readable format so we will give it a
meaningful name and then chop so many letters out that the meaning is
lost'. The first rule of abbreviation for humans is to remove as many
letters as possible without losing the meaning *and no more*. 

Sigh.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

Received on Wednesday, 25 September 1996 21:35:30 UTC