Re: Calendaring Interoperability over HTTP

Steve Hanna:
>
>I just posted a new Internet Draft titled "Calendaring Interoperability
>over HTTP (CIH)". This document describes (in fairly vague terms for
>now) how calendaring and scheduling systems could communicate with each
>other using HTTP. A URL for the Internet-Draft is:
>ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-calsch-cih-00.txt

I read the draft, and the idea to use HTTP for calendaring looks sound to
me.  

If you are worried about the overhead of implementing HTTP/1.1, you may want
to consider allowing both HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 to be used, while requiring
that all 1.1-based implementations are downwards compatible with 1.0.  1.0
can be implemented easily, and there is a lot of free code around that does
it.  1.1 can be used when high performance is needed.  It is trivial for an
1.1 implementation to be downwards compatible with 1.0.

If you go this way, I suggest changing the CIH URL encoding to

 http://cih.world.std.com/cih/hanna
                         ^^^^^

this will make it easier to set up CIH servers by using existing HTTP/1.0
software.  (You can basically let your regular web server act as the CIH
server if you set up cih.world.std.com as a DNS alias for www.world.std.com,
and install a CGI script under /cih).

A problem is that HTTP/1.0 is not an official IETF standard, this may make
it difficult to use HTTP/1.0 process-wise.

If CIH is a long-term project (say planned for the end of this year), you may
want to forget about using HTTP/1.0 altogether.  By that time, a sufficient
amount of free HTTP/1.1 code will be available.  Some 1.1 code exists
already, but as far as I know it is mostly unix-only.

>Steve Hanna

Koen.

Received on Monday, 17 February 1997 12:58:35 UTC