Re: HTTP 1.1 Server Available for Testing

Hi folks, could people stop getting all bent out of shape over this?

Roy did not exactly put his case well, he made it sound like he was asking 
for a chance for the Apache group to catch up rather than making a point
about version control issues. I wouldn;t mind less of the "X. and I 
set out the requirements ages ago" attitude. One of the things I have
always found very attractive about Tim is that he doesn't try to throw
his weight arround. 

The 1.1 draft has not changed materially since the great cullback in
May. The wording has changed somewhat but the protocol itself has been
stable. 

Now the IESG could in theory reject the draft but they would be very 
ill advised to do so. In the first place there is no substantive
debate in the working group over 1.1, there are no outstanding 
controversies that concern it.

The Internet is not quite the place it was five years ago when returning
a draft to a working group for further consideration was of little
import. Today there is half the goddam stock market and an election
riding on the Web. The HTTP/1.1 draft is already late and more than one
very senior and very influential person has made it very clear that
if the IESG does not play ball it will be taken away from them. 

If the IESG reject the draft they will have to have one hell of a good
reason for it.


Now lets consider what the draft is being forwarded as consideration as.
RFC - how many people remember what those words mean? REQUEST for COMMENTS.
The draft is submitted as a proposed standard. There was a time when 
having an implementation of a standard before it was proposed was considered
something of a good thing.

Now Roy may be correct in his statement of the IETF rules but hes entirely
out of line concerning their spirit. The idea is to develop good protocols
which have well defined specifications which ensure that applications 
interoperate. I don't think that the lawyerly attitude helps. If people
think thats how they want to work then they better expect to make room
for some real lawyers to join the group.

		Phill

Received on Thursday, 15 August 1996 19:20:28 UTC