Re: OPTIONS *

Jeffrey Mogul <Jeff.Mogul@hp.com> writes:

> 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 recollection would be more like the working group had gotten too
tired at that point to do the work and too worried about adding
anything to the spec that wasn't already in deployed software (an
unavoidable consequence of a long specification process for an
already-popular protocol).

For those who are curious, HTTPs cousin SIP actually ended up using
OPTIONS and specifying what it was good for:

  http://www.apps.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3261.html#sec-11.1

I agree that the best that can be done now is to document what can and
cannot be achieved with what we have (pretty limited, but it does make
a good no-op message; we used it that way in RFC 2817).

-- 
Scott Lawrence        
  http://skrb.org/scott/

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 14:00:34 UTC