- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Wed, 6 Mar 1996 00:15:50 +0100 (MET)
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Cc: koen@win.tue.nl, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Roy T. Fielding: > >No conversion occurs within the same major version number. >In fact, that is the main distinguisher between the major and >minor version changes. OK, I just re-read Section 3.1, and I see now where my interpretation was wrong. The correct interpretation makes me just as uneasy, though. >Any 1.x proxy can safely forward any >1.x request or response without changing anything except >the Request-Line/Status-Line (it always sends its own native version) >and the Connection, Forwarded, and Host header fields. I don't see immediately why Connection, Forwarded, and Host would be special, but never mind that now, I will worry about such details in April. I guess the HTTP/1.1 spec will need a long section about interoperating with 1.0 applications. General comments on section 3.1: 1) Is there any rationale for the rules in Section 3.1? 2) I'm not sure that I really like the weak requirements for translation by proxies that are in the draft spec now: these requirements will basically shift the burden of making things interoperable from proxy authors to httpd and CGI authors, and there are a lot more CGI authors than proxy authors. 3) With proxies being allowed to upgrade and downgrade the minor version number, it seems that the server, it it gets a 1.1 request, will not be able to find out if there are any 1.0 applications in the request chain. 4) So the server has to make things interoperable, but it does not even know the capabilities (versions) of the software it is serving to! So, for example, if the server uses a 1.1 Cache-Control header, it must always include a 1.0 Expires header. 5) Wouldn't things be easier if we did a major version number change and defined HTTP/2.0 instead of HTTP/1.1? 6) In summary, I suspect that the version rules will need to be seriously reviewed. I want to propose adding the issue "version rules in Section 3.1" to the HTTP/1.1 issues list. > ...Roy T. Fielding Koen.
Received on Tuesday, 5 March 1996 15:20:22 UTC