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Re: Content-MD5

From: Rich Salz <rsalz@osf.org>
Date: Sun, 5 Nov 1995 22:01:11 -0500
Message-Id: <9511060301.AA28264@sulphur.osf.org>
To: NED@innosoft.com, rsalz@osf.org
Cc: dl@hplyot.obspm.fr, dsr@w3.org, fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com, http-wg-request%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
So much for hope.

Look, Ned.  Without thinking much I came up with four examples where the
IETF has RFCs on "competing" standards, and without thinking hard I named
several.  Your followup was non-responsive.  One isn't your area of
expertise but you challenged me anyway, one you got wrong (Usenet, not
UUCP mail), one you don't undersatnd the history of (SNMP), and one where
I was sloppy in that I talked about character sets without enough context,
apparently, for you to see that I was talking about all the charset
definitions and transport issues that are floating around.

I have email from Scott Bradner that says the IETF has a history of
adopting competing standards.

>In other words, you don't care enough to bother to try and reconcile the
>two different schemes. That's fine with me, but surely you see it is this
>sort of attitude that has led to the present situation?

I don't understand how you could come to such an understanding.  I know
that you saw my question on convergence statements and subsequent response.

HTTP probably wants an extensible scheme that support multiple hashes in
a single header.  Email has Content-MD5 as existing practice.  I had
discussions with one of the RFC authors and was convinced that better
language standardizing common practice was a good thing, in spite of the
fact that my implementation experience (arguably the first in widespread
Internet use) showed it to be less than optimal.  Again, this is just a
summary of my previous messages on this topic, easily verifiable from the
archives.
	/r$
Received on Sunday, 5 November 1995 19:06:23 UTC

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