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.

Correct.  But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't be valuable both to
implementors and to the IETF process to have a test suite exist
somewhere.  Even if the development of that suite wouldn't be an
appropriate IETF WG (which I agree it would not), one of the
weaknesses of the current IETF process is that there is not enough
feedback regarding which parts of the standards really get done.  I
helped run the effort to document what features had been done for the
transition from PS to DS for HTTP/1.1, and that data was pretty poor
quality.

On the subject of SHOULDs - many of them in the HTTP/1.1 specs would
probably have been MUSTs but for some backward compatibility problems
that doing so would have introduced.  Over time, it will be of benefit
to be able to actually measure whether those have been implemented as
the authors of the specs intended.

--
Scott Lawrence         Architect             <lawrence@agranat.com>
Virata             http://www.virata.com/         http://emweb.com/