Re: WGLC Review of HTTP (-semantics)

Leaving upgrade aside, though I think that is equally speculative, because it's more or less what HTTP has always said about upgrading...

On Sun, Feb 7, 2021, at 12:40, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> This is a chicken and egg problem. What permits extensions to be
> deployed in HTTP is the fact that existing recipients are prepared
> to ignore them. It is only by defining what can be ignored, before
> we deploy, that we can understand both the scope of what can be
> safely deployed in the future. Without that, we get stuck in this fear
> of anything but the status quo.
> 
> IMO, mid-stream metadata is a well understood concept that is common
> in other protocols. The reason people haven't deployed it in HTTP is
> because we haven't provided a framework in which to do so.

This is exactly the sort of discussion we might have if someone were proposing an extension to the protocol.  We can probably agree to try that out.

But this is - otherwise - documenting a protocol that exists.  I don't accept that we need to document this extension to the core semantics in this way.  We are empowered to provide a new document that defines these semantics as an extension to the core semantics.  The same document might define METADATA frames or chunk extensions whatever else is needed to get the thing tested out.

I don't think that the core semantics document is the place to conduct that experiment.  That is all.

Received on Monday, 8 February 2021 00:53:58 UTC