Chopan - Compressed HTTP Over PANs (draft-frank-6lowpan-chopan-00)

I just looked at

     <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-frank-6lowpan-chopan-00>

and I'm a bit concerned by the fact that this essentially profiles HTTP.

For instance, it makes it impossible to use HTTP extensions that use 
"new" method names or status codes. Profiling like this has been a 
concern in the past, such as when the Atom WG discussed whether it could 
rely on DELETE and PUT due to restricted implementations/mappings that 
would only allow GET and POST -- so the problem may not be apparent 
right now considering deployed HTTP applications, but it will once 
people want to do new things.

In particular (just from a quick reading):

- HTTP extension methods not supported
- some standard headers are restricted in what they can carry (ETag, 
Cache-Control)
- some headers are listed as "standard", but do not seem to be 
registered ("Awake-Time"?)
- new headers are allowed to be stripped (that closes an important 
extension point)

I can see why the compression is optimized for common HTTP features, but 
it really shouldn't make extensions hard or impossible.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Tuesday, 14 July 2009 07:34:02 UTC