Re: NEW ISSUE: editorial bug in 13.5.1

    I was looking at RFC2616, Section 13.5.1 which currently ends with 
    (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-13.5.1>):
    
        Other hop-by-hop headers MUST be listed in a Connection header,
        (section 14.10) to be introduced into HTTP/1.1 (or later).
    
    Sorry?
    
    My first idea was that the comma was just in the wrong place, making it
    
        Other hop-by-hop headers MUST be listed in a Connection header
        (section 14.10), to be introduced into HTTP/1.1 (or later).
    
    But of course that still doesn't make any sense.
    
    So I looked at RFC2068, Section 13.5.1 
    (<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2068#section-13.5.1>) and that one says:
    
        Hop-by-hop headers introduced in future versions of HTTP MUST be
        listed in a Connection header, as described in section 14.10.
    
    Now that makes sense, and it seems that RFC2616 was broken when somebody 
    tried to rewrite that sentence.
    
<rant>
This is when it would be nice to have access to the Internet-Draft
versions that expired along the way, rather than having them consigned
to IETF's Orwellian memory hole.  
</rant>

Fortunately, these are available on the Web (although some of the
versions out there seem to have been truncated accidentally).  The
change crept in between draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-rev-05.txt and
draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-rev-06.txt (which, I believe, was the
last version before the RFC).

    Proposal: just say...:
    
        Other hop-by-hop headers MUST be listed in a Connection header
        (Section 14.10).
    
    
I suspect what the re-writer (probably not me!) meant was something
like:

        Other hop-by-hop headers, if they are introduced either
	in HTTP/1.1 or later versions of HTTP/1.x, MUST be listed
	in a Connection header (Section 14.10).

(It's not clear that the HTTP/1.1 spec can impose this kind of rule on
HTTP/N.M where N > 1.)

-Jeff

Received on Tuesday, 12 December 2006 21:20:46 UTC