Re: Conformance Test for HTTP 1.1

>The simplest answer as to why this isn't good is that it's outside the
>charter of the IETF.  This organization is here to create standards. 
>Not to validate/judge whether someone is compliant with them.

compliancy to a protocol is one of the key expectation of a specification.
the folks who worked on the spec have a clear interest in seeing whether
all the effort they went to in terms of M/S/M were met. it is not an issue
of "judging" and saying "oh sorry, ee.software is broken".

claiming that ietf should not be interested in compliancy appears a bit 
odd to me. we all stand to gain from making sure that implementations
are compliant to a protocol spec. ietf should be interested. at least 
they were interested last year when they invited me to give a talk at 
a plenary sesion last year during their d.c. meeting - the talk was
on http/1.1 protocol compliancy.

what is wrong with ietf-sponsored group coming up with a test suite 
for an open protocol specification? anyone who wants have their
software tested against it can do so. ietf is unlikely to be partial
in the construction of a compliancy test suite. 

cheers,
bala

balachander krishnamurthy
http://www.research.att.com/~bala/papers

Received on Tuesday, 10 October 2000 10:22:27 UTC