- From: Ted Hardie <hardie@merlot.arc.nasa.gov>
- Date: Fri, 5 Jul 1996 12:49:40 -0700 (PDT)
- To: Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.ca>
- Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Francois writes: > HTTP/1.1 is a new protocol, it mandates a number of new things like > Host:, persistent connections, etc. so that both servers and clients > will require updating. Making charset mandatory is very minor, > especially since it was already there in 1.0 and hence (in principle > at least) understood by clients. Francois, I think we have a terminology problem here. HTTP/1.1 is not a new protocol. It is a new standard. One of the main design goals for HTTP/1.1 has been to maintain interoperability with HTTP/1.0, which is an existing protocol, though not a standard. The changes made to HTTP aim to maintain interoperability even at the cost of some design cruft; that's why there is a Host: header instead of a "simple" change to using full URLs in all requests. We can all see that mandating a charset might be a good design choice; as Steff pointed out in Montreal, encoding a value in a null element has some serious design flaws. We can all also see that adding charsets would improve the interoperation of compliant clients and servers. We have to weigh that against the interoperability between 1.1 and 1.0, especially in situations where there are caches between the end-user client and the origin server. I was serious in my request that you write up your solution to this problem in an Internet Draft; we would all like this to work. We are not trying to create something biased or broken. We are trying to create something which will work well in a world in which not all clients, proxies, and servers are at the latest revision. Sometimes that means we have to take things in several steps; that doesn't mean we don't intend to do them--it means we intend to do them carefullly. best regards, Ted Hardie NASA Science Internet
Received on Friday, 5 July 1996 12:52:56 UTC