Re: Multiple Content-Location headers

Jim,

> Roy Fielding points out
> (http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1998q1/0152.html) that
your
> proposal would require syntactic change to Content-Location, as specified
> in HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2068).  I (and I believe others) suspect that the
syntactic
> changes required would break running, deployed implementations.

> HTTP/1.1 is already in very significant deployment. It is essentially
> impossible at this date to introduce incompatible change to the HTTP
protocol,
> both on (proper) process grounds, but more importantly on pragmatic
grounds
> of not breaking deployed code (which is what the process is attempts to
> ensure).

Could I suggest that to break this impasse, that MHTML switches to a new
header field Content-Label to replace its use of Content-Location. This
would better capture the MHTML role of the header field, and would also
allow the simplifications I argued for last week on the MHTML list to
proceed. I.e., Content-Label could only specify an absolute URI, and would
not establish a base.

We also have a pre-existing definition (see RFC 2110), but the state of
MHTML implementation may allow this late breaking change to take effect
without too much negative impact. Speaking for Lotus, we can accomodate it.

Nick