Comment on PEP draft

Hi Henrik,

I have not had time to fully understand the new PEP draft yet, but I
am very worried about the dynamic header name allocation scheme in
there.  I have two questions:

1) If I understand things correctly, servers could send a header like
blah-1:, which was mapped by a user agent, in a response.  What
happens if the server makes this response cachable?  Won't you have
huge trouble if a user agent maps a new header to extension X and then
gets the same header back in a response which was cached in a proxy 3
days ago, when the header was mapped to extension Y by some other
agent?  Or is there a way to prevent/detect such collisions?

2) I suspect that supporting header mapping will not be simple.  So
what is the payoff of having the complexity of header mapping at all,
in stead of just putting all information in the PEP header itself
(which is where the previous draft seemed to be going)?  

If the answer is just `saving bytes', I don't think the added
complexity is warranted.  Saving header bytes by adding state, if done
at all, should be done by a generalised mechanism in HTTP/1.2.

Koen.

Received on Monday, 5 May 1997 11:35:48 UTC