Re: Rewrite of feature tag syntax rules

Jeffrey Mogul:
>
>I'm hesitant to get into the debate over this, and this is my
>absolute last message on the topic.
>
>Basically, I agree with Larry, but I think there's a more
>succinct description of the philosophy here.
[...]

>  In fact, if we made a rule that ALL new HTTP
>header-names and tags were to be composed of randomly chosen
>(but unique) small integers, we would avoid a lot of useless debate.

Urgl.  Yes please, and make all new MIME types and HTML tags small
integers too!  Why debate names if we can prevent it by having
millions of authors look up small integers instead!

>HTTP is for computers to talk to each other, not for humans.
>
>Koen and others want human users to be able to specify feature
>tags.  Fine; just introduce a map between a set of human-sensible,
>internationalized names, and the enumerated set of feature tags.
>This map could be implementation specific, or it could be
>standardized *independent of HTTP*, to make service-authoring
>tools more portable.  But the purpose of this map is to cleanly
>separate what computers do and what humans do.

I don't like the idea of requiring the use of a mapping tool to make
things author-friendly.  That is no way to bootstrap a new
technology.  The first users won't have nice auhoring tools which
map things for them.  Thus, requiring mappings to make things usable
will only result in there never being any first users.

Mind you, I want feature tags to be about as author-friendly as MIME
types.  I don't think this is asking too much.

>-Jeff

Koen.

Received on Monday, 19 May 1997 13:35:29 UTC