- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Sat, 24 Feb 1996 23:04:15 -0800
- To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
> HTTP-WG is in a state of crisis. We urgently need a standards-track
> document that
> ...
> * supports those features that vendors have implemented because of
> customer demand (state tracking, range retrieval)
That's new. State tracking has never been considered important to
HTTP/1.1 and, except for caching issues, is orthogonal to the standard.
There is no reason for it not to be a separate draft.
The caching issues were handled via the Cache-control header.
Range retrieval wasn't even considered until a week before draft 00
was submitted and has only been advocated by 3 people. Even so, we
came up with a solution in the form of 206, Content-Range, and Range.
I am not aware of any implementations of partial GET requests.
> What we don't need are arguments of the form "if we have X, we must
> have Y, because Y is necessary to complete X."
Which is the same as saying X won't achieve consensus without Y, which
is why you are wrong on this issue. If that occurs, both X and Y get
postponed to 1.2. There are some X's that are worth delaying the standard.
> There *were* disagreements about the form of TRACE, which are
> apparently resolved. DELETE is an easy target. (Uh, what's it do to
> negotiable resources? Delete all of them? What happens with proxy
> caches? ....)
Those are *your* questions about DELETE, not the WG's. In answer,
DELETE of a negotiable resource does mean deletion of that resource.
Proxy caches do exactly what is already defined in draft 01.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92717-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Saturday, 24 February 1996 23:09:20 UTC