Interoperability Event

  I think that it would be a good idea to hold an HTTP/1.1
  interoperability demonstration event.  The goal would be to showcase
  the commitment of all participants to the 1.1 standard and to
  discover interoperability prolems.  This kind of event has been done
  before for other network protocols, and is a great way to get media
  attention and to 'focus the minds' of developers.

  There are a number of things to be agreed upon; I present my first
  cut at such a list just to get the ball rolling:

  Venue (When & Where):

    It seems to me that the most natural venue would be
    Networld/Interop, since the Interop part of that event was
    originally organized around just this sort of thing.  The last
    Interop in Las Vegas featured an interoperability demonstration of
    multicast IP vendors.  However, the next one in Atlanta (Oct) is
    too soon, and the one after that in Las Vegas (May 98) is too
    late.

    Of course, theoretically at least we could just do the whole thing
    over the Internet... if all particapants used published host names
    and had a telephone contact for each host name...

  Goals:

    I'd like to see a list of demonstration goals; probably the MUST
    and SHOULD list from HTTP/1.1 would be a good starting point,
    which means that there would be more than one set of goals: origin
    servers, proxies, and browsers.  (If we did get together
    physically we could organize it that way physically - browsers at
    one end, origin servers at the other, and proxies in between :).

  Non-Goals:

    I'd also like to see some ground rules for things we agree _not_
    to do so that we keep the message positive and simple enough for
    our friends in the media to get right.

    This is about HTTP/1.1, so demonstrations of integration with
    mail, ftp, video streaming and other non-HTTP operations should be
    out of bounds (or at least clearly separate from the HTTP
    demonstrations).

    This is not about making other vendors look bad; it is about
    making the protocol look good.  To the extent that there needs to
    be any final statement from the event organization, it should come
    from neutral third parties (perhaps we could recruit some
    interested academics who are not connected to any vendor?).

  I've copied this to the W3C http list just to pick up any interested
  parties there; perhaps this could actually be done under thier
  auspices?

  Thoughts?

--
Scott Lawrence           EmWeb Embedded Server       <lawrence@agranat.com>
Agranat Systems, Inc.        Engineering            http://www.agranat.com/

Received on Friday, 29 August 1997 08:40:25 UTC