- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Tue, 13 Dec 1994 01:47:22 PST
- To: mvanheyn@cs.indiana.edu
- Cc: fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
You know, Internet protocols don't define "conforming implementations" but rather "conforming behavior on the net"; you might want to define a "conforming implementation" as "an implementation that never exhibits non-conforming behavior", but of course, that seems to be a site/configuration issue as much as anything. The conformance requirement on data streams is that senders only send conforming data streams to recievers (unless somehow the protocol allows for the recievers to indicate that they're willing ot accept non-conforming data streams.) We should talk about senders and recievers rather than servers and clients, because when clients send data to servers, the roles are reversed and the conformance requirements reverse. No sender should send an unregistered type to a reciever that hasn't indicated a willingness to accept it. The 'practice' that allows HTTP to be somehow more free with MIME types is that the protocol allows for negotiation. That "text/html" wasn't registered in the official MIME registry is somewhat of a red herring: it was certainly registered in the web documents.
Received on Tuesday, 13 December 1994 01:49:16 UTC