Re: Comments on the HTTP/1.0 draft.

Okay, folks, no need to get personal -- please remember that this is
e-mail and your remarks should be addressed to the content of the
spec -- not to each other.

Marc, I understand your concerns about MIME conformance and following
the norms of good network behavior.  However, HTTP is not Internet
Mail and thus its design constraints are quite different.  Although it
may at times cause confusion, I would still prefer to use 80% of MIME
for HTTP/1.0 instead of 0%  -- 100% is simply not an option.

Use of "x-token" for unofficial MIME types will not be required by
the spec -- in fact, that was one of the main reasons for a separate
BNF from that given in MIME.  For reasons that I have discussed on
prior mailing lists (and don't have time to repeat right now),
use of x-tokens for anything but experiments is extremely bad
engineering and not appropriate for systems that allow content
negotiation.  Besides, it is not current practice (even in Mail).

The HTTP/1.0 spec will not force any changes to existing clients and
servers EXCEPT where those applications are known to be defficient due
to bugs in their design (i.e. bad Content-Type parsing) or in their
implementation (i.e. XMosaic's useless Accept: headers).

We will add explicit mention of what it means to be "conforming"
and what methods/headers/responses are appropriate in what contexts
for the next version of the spec.

......Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                                     <fielding@ics.uci.edu>
                     <URL:http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding>

Received on Monday, 5 December 1994 11:21:11 UTC