Re: New PEP draft available as ID!

At 06:46 PM 4/30/97 -0400, Hallam-Baker wrote:

>I believe that the problems with PEP could be solved by abandoning the
>idea of sending meta-protocol information along with the connection
>data.
>
>Instead of doing this I would like to see a single tag to define the
>semantics of any x-tended headers and how proxies should deal with them.
>The tag would be of the form :-
>
>PEP-Extension: <version> <url>

But Phill - this is exactly what the current draft says! Meta-information
and  transaction information isn't mixed and PEP is nothing more than a
binding between a new header field and it's semantics (see my previous mail
in reply to Yaron's mail)

>I understand that there are occasions in which this will not work such 
>as intranets not connected to the Internet and intergalactic spacecraft.
>I think that attempting to address these corner cases by sending a
>couple of hundred bytes of verbiage along with every message is a bit 
>broken and unlikely to fly in any case.

The current PEP draft actually handles these situations - which is the
reason why the draft is somewhat longer than it was last time. No need to
discriminate against anybody as long as they are still in URI space.

>PEP only specifies the grammar of the protocol, not the semantics. It
>can only solve the problem of proxies and other intermediaries that need
>to know something about the tags being passed.

PEP relies on normal HTTP/1.1 semantics that already describes how to deal
with proxies - caching and non-caching. PEP doesn't change this model not
does it have to.

Henrik

--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, <frystyk@w3.org>
World Wide Web Consortium, MIT/LCS NE43-346
545 Technology Square, Cambridge MA 02139, USA

Received on Thursday, 1 May 1997 09:47:31 UTC