Re: Straw-man charter for http-bis

Mark Nottingham wrote:
> I'm very aware of your feelings. I'm also aware of the pain that  
> folks go through when they try to implement the current spec. Yes,  
> some of that is caused by the organisation and committee-speak there,  
> but much more is on very specific points where the spec is silent or  
> misleading -- our issues list now has more than sixty issues. That  
> this effort will help in those cases. No, it's not a magic pill, but  
> a complete rewrite wouldn't be either, and it would have much less  
> chance of success.

Just a little thing.  I think the issues list is very helpful, from an
implementors point of view.  Even where there are unclarified or
unspecified behaviours, an implementor can see at least that there may
be varying interpretations, and make a decision about how to handle
them.

I think that it's _more_ useful than trying to squeeze out every last
typo or grammatical confusion from the standard.  There's only so much
energy; attempted perfection in a standard can take away from
recording practical outside-the-standard issues which have to be dealt
with in practice.

I think a "known common errors in deployed implementations" list would
also be helpful, for the same reasons.  (Like the TCP one).

-- Jamie

Received on Friday, 1 June 2007 05:15:15 UTC