Re: MUST use Content-Base

>So therefore changing the MAY to MUST breaks HTTP/1.1 proposed standard
>compliant implementations which choose to honor the may, as is their right,
>by ignoring the header.

Sorry Yaron, there is no MAY in the Content-Base definition of RFC 2068
aside from the optional decision of the server.  If the browser does not
implement Content-Base as specified, then the browser is not compliant
with HTTP/1.1 as specified in RFC 2068.  Scott's proposal was merely a
clarification.

If, on the other hand, you want to argue that Content-Base is not going
to be implemented, and therefore should not be in the HTTP/1.1 standard,
then that's a valid concern.

When I was rewriting the URI specification and arguing with the MHTML
group, I came to the conclusion that Content-Base is not needed provided
that Content-Location is implemented as specified.  The reasoning was
similar to what Dave Morris mentioned: the only person capable of knowing
whether or not the embedded references in a document are relative to
some other namespace is the document creator, and they are better-off
making that distinction within the document.  Granted, some formats may
not have the equivalent of HTML's BASE, but I would argue that those
formats are very unlikely to contain relative references.

Does MSIE implement Content-Location as specified?  Note that this
will eventually be very important, since it enables the reduction of
external redirect messages for internally redirected content.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 1998 14:50:28 UTC