W3C home > Mailing lists > Public > ietf-http-wg@w3.org > July to September 1997

Re: 301/302

From: Ben Laurie <ben@algroup.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 19:27:28 +0100
Message-Id: <33E0D90E.69292828@algroup.co.uk>
To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
X-Mailing-List: <http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com> archive/latest/4043
Larry Masinter wrote:
> 
> there are many more elegant ways to distinguish between
> old and new versions of user-written scripts, too, but
> my point was to counter the claim that it was _impossible_,
> not to invent an elegant possibility.

Fair enough, though I don't think I made the claim that it was
impossible, merely that CGI was broken because we have to invent
something outside it to deal with the problem.

> In general, if there are going to be any changes are
> bug fixes, we have to deal with scripts that were written
> against older specs. There are ".asis" CERN server scripts
> that attempt to emit not just the body and a few directives
> but the entire HTTP response. Clearly, if those scripts
> are not rewritten but aren't conformant, they can't be
> called HTTP. So at some point you _must_ distinguish scripts
> (and servers) by their version, and either label older
> scripts as "not HTTP/1.x" or else patch up their output.

Surely if one never changes the semantics of existing headers it is not
necessary to know which version is being used?

Cheers,

Ben.

-- 
Ben Laurie                Phone: +44 (181) 994 6435  Email:
ben@algroup.co.uk
Freelance Consultant and  Fax:   +44 (181) 994 6472
Technical Director        URL: http://www.algroup.co.uk/Apache-SSL
A.L. Digital Ltd,         Apache Group member (http://www.apache.org)
London, England.          Apache-SSL author
Received on Thursday, 31 July 1997 11:29:32 UTC

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thursday, 2 February 2023 18:43:03 UTC