- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@liege.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 14:38:17 -0700
- To: "David W. Morris" <dwm@shell.portal.com>
- Cc: http working group <http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com>
> This group is a bit two faced. A couple weeks a go, a prominant member was
> chastising folks who might be publishing a server and calling it HTTP/1.1
> before the very stable draft is really approved by the IETF. Now we
> are complaining because one or more other software publishers chose not
> to deliver software matching a spec about which discussion had gotten
> very hot and might be expected to be an unstable implementation target.
>
> C'mon folks we can't have it both ways!
You are missing the point. Digest can and should have been implemented
in HTTP/1.0 as the experiment that it was -- whether or not it is stable
only affects the allocation of limited resources. In contrast, we are
using the label "HTTP/1.1" to indicate minimum compliance to a specific
proposed standard, and you cannot indicate minimum compliance to something
which is still subject to change. Any future change to HTTP's minimum
compliance will now require a change to the HTTP version, since that
is how the version stuff is supposed to work. My concern is that the WG
as a whole needs to understand the meaning of HTTP-version, and when
the version number should change, since that understanding is central
to the protocol's extensibility.
...Roy T. Fielding
Department of Information & Computer Science (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
University of California, Irvine, CA 92697-3425 fax:+1(714)824-4056
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/
Received on Thursday, 29 August 1996 14:42:44 UTC