Re: OPTIONS *

Alex Rousskov <rousskov@measurement-factory.com> wrote

    On Tue, 25 Nov 2003, Julian Reschke wrote:
    
    > Any chance to get that onto the RFC2616 issues list?
    
    In my experience, you need to convince one of the original authors or
    anybody Scott Lawrence trusts that a certain change is warranted.

I think there is no doubt that many or most of the authors think
that OPTIONS is basically broken in RFC2616, so a well-designed
rewording is probably welcome.  However, given that (1) we are
not likely to change the version number at this stage, and (2)
without changing the version number we cannot really expect
to place new requirements on servers, any change that might be
proposed is probably more likely to be of the form "clients
cannot count on OPTIONS behavior, but here's some advice to server
implementors."

-Jeff

P.S.: for what it is worth (not much at this point), Scott
himself was a co-author of draft-ietf-http-options-02.txt,
"Specification of HTTP/1.1 OPTIONS messages", back in 1997.  My
recollection is that the Working Group rejected this approach and
so the I-D died, but in my opinion it was the best design that was
available.  (My opinion is biased, for reasons that might be
obvious to anyone who reads this draft, available via Google and
other fine search engines.)

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 11:36:30 UTC