- From: Albert Lunde <albert-lunde@nwu.edu>
- Date: Mon, 26 Jan 1998 18:11:12 CST
- To: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
> > I understand that we are dealing with a legacy of bad HTTP choices > back when there was no IETF involvement, adn the people developing > ythe "standard" understood tha the way to set standards was to "just > do what you wnat to do" adn get it over with. > > All this menas that it is just an accident of history and so we have > to just grin and bear it and live with all the bad fallout effects. A historical note.... I'd like to say that _some_ of the differences between HTTP and MIME were not entirely accidents of history: they were also justified as being optimized for different transports. I think I started following the http working group list not long before the question of tolernance for different kinds of end-of-line in text was being considered (or reconsidered.) At that time, there _were_ existing browsers which implemented tolerance for different end of lines in various ways; so there were legacy code issues. But there were also server authors who wanted to optimize for speed: they wanted to be able to just throw the bytes of a text file out on the net without making the end-of-lines into some cannonical format. The discussion was in December 1994 on http-wg list, much of it under the Subject: "Re: Comments on the HTTP/1.0 draft." See for example, Chuck Shotton's comments at: http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1994q4/0101.html http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1994q4/0119.html http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1994q4/0122.html http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1994q4/0127.html and other remarks in the same thread (I'm pointing out Chuck mostly because I recall him as a server author who spoke up at the time, not because he's the only one who said something.) See also: Subject: "Closure on canonicalization, I hope" http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1994q4/0300.html (I admit to having said some questionable things in the same threads because I was new to the process; but my personal involement makes me remember it.) You can view some of the other differences in a similar light of optimizing for different transport.
Received on Monday, 26 January 1998 16:13:02 UTC