Re: REPOST (was: HTTP working group status & issues)

This issue has nothing whatsoever to do with i18n.  i18n does not
*need* to use POST requests any more than non-i18n activities need
to use POST requests, and if you folks would stop knee-jerking every time
the subject was brought up you might get a little more accomplished.

Both Link and rel=source are very old (pre-1992) and well understood.
What they lack is a complete specification, and even that is only because
people become preoccupied with midnight hacks instead of long-term design.
If you want to standardize a midnight hack, go ahead, but stop insisting
that I respond to your questions about it.  If you want to standardize Link,
then I will help.

> 	Your last point, Koen, is the bottom line.  If Roy refuses
> to make clear how his intellectual midnight hack could actually be
> made to work in the real world, and no header like Safe is added to
> the Standard, then even the vendors who don't really care about IETF
> standards may be reluctant to deploy because of possible legal
> repercussions.

As I said before, I see no need for it because there is no *problem*.
Getting a warning message about reposting a POST is an inconvenience,
not a problem.  Being unable to bookmark POST input-data is a user agent
implementation issue, not an HTTP problem (and can be solved via Link
or usage of 303).

As for refusing "to make clear" how to do it, that's your problem.
Take the specifications and design notes already provided by TimBL
and two IETF WG's (HTML and HTTP), write down the solution, implement it,
and then standardize the implementation.  If I had the time to do it,
the work would have already been done.  I don't have that time.

So, like Larry said, this discussion should be closed until someone
does the work necessary to define and solve the problem in the form
of an ID.  How much work to put into it, and the scope of the problem
that is actually solved, is up to you.

 ...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, 10 October 1996 03:25:14 UTC