Re: Revising RFC2616 - what's happening

On Oct 19, 2006, at 6:21 AM, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> I think it would be a mistake to keep the document in its current form
> as a monolithic document; it should be split into several documents to
> make the whole thing approachable. Obvious candidates for separate  
> specs
> would be caching, content negotiation, message format, and URL  
> schemes.

That is pretty much exactly what I said when 2616 was being edited,
and again last week when I volunteered to edit such a split.  I do not
believe that a monolithic document is reviewable, and that has been
proven twice now with 2616 and with Jim's attempt in December 2003.
I said it wasn't worth doing, and unfortunately the folks who want to
do it anyway took that as meaning I wouldn't approve of publication.

It is frustrating to have other people create a large amount of work
for me to do (reviewing other peoples' attempts to edit HTTP is easily
twice the work of editing the document myself) when I know it is going
to be a disappointment anyway, particularly given that the security
issues require an update to 2617 first.

Mark keeps noting that "the community" wants a minor update, not a
revised set of readable drafts.  I disagree.  If that is what the
community wanted, people would have reviewed Jim's draft.

I can't ignore this process because I am still responsible for one of
the primary implementations of HTTP -- Apache HTTP Server -- and we
are more directly effected by changes to the standard than any other
group due to the nature of our mission.  It is ridiculous that we have
to waste our time reviewing an unreadable document.

Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding                            <http://roy.gbiv.com/>
Chief Scientist, Day Software              <http://www.day.com/>

Received on Friday, 20 October 2006 18:55:14 UTC