Re: HTTP: T-T-T-Talking about MIME Generation

>>>>> "Dave" == Dave Kristol <dmk@allegra.att.com> writes:

    Dave> My tastes (obviously) run to a more evolutionary approach
    Dave> for HTTP.  I'm unconvinced that the performance problems
    Dave> require a flash cut to a binary protocol.  Spero has shown
    Dave> that doing multiple transactions over one connection
    Dave> achieves signficant performance improvements.  His response
    Dave> is to change HTTP drastically.  Mine is to do so within the
    Dave> current overall design.

Well, there's always my other response :-) One of the things I talked about
with Alex at the IETF was making a slight change to the SESSION proposal. 
The idea is to use the SESSION method to switch the connection over to 
running SCP, and then use SCP to manage multiple sequential HTTP 1.0 
transactions. It turns out that this technique allows even more code to be
reused than using MIME multipart, and provides a very obvious transition
path to full HTTP-NG. 

One other thing that was discussed was the relative advantages of using a 
session method vs. an ignorable header. It turns out that there is a problem
with using ignorable headers when proxies are used - if a proxy which doesn't
interpret the header is used to talk to a server which does handle the header,
the connection can become deadlocked (the end server things that the 
proxy doesn't want it to drop the connection, whilst the proxy is sitting there
waiting for the connection to drop). 

Simon

Received on Friday, 16 December 1994 13:33:00 UTC