splitting HTTP section or not?

I've been thinking a bit about whether or not we should split the section on HTTP implementation, and here's my take on it, just to start the discussion.

In favor of splitting:

- The MF spec will become purely a user-preceived semantics specification. It talks about user-visible URLs, how these should be interpreted (for example, the Media Annotation spec could state that an annotation to a partial media needs to be addressed by MF) and how these should be rendered.

- We don't run the risk of a prolonged CR phase because everyone only implements the user-visible MF bits and no-one does the MF-HTTP bits.

- In future, if a server or cache-server implements a subset of the MF-HTTP functionality (only 1 or 2 of the 4 methods) there is no easy way to state this.  These implementations will always fail some of the tests. This could be fixed by modularizing the spec, but "modularization" is about as popular as "xml" or "declarative" nowadays, within the W3C community:-(

Against splitting:

- Browser implementors will have to look in two places, MF and MF-HTTP. But then, they have to look in a lot of places already.

- MF-HTTP will rely heavily on MF, so even http-server vendors will have to read MF to be able to understand MF-HTTP. The same is probably also true for people creating caching servers and such.

- If it turns out one of the 4 schemes in MF-HTTP becomes very popular and the other three are ignored we find this out before going to final, so the resulting spec (MF plus the MF-HTTP bit that everyone implements) will be cleaner.

Cop out:

- We leave MF-HTTP in for now, but state that from the moment 2 complying implementations of the non-MF-HTTP bits are available we will wait no longer than 3 months (or any other period of time) for complying implementations of MF-HTTP. Any bits of MF-HTTP that haven't been implemented by two or more parties by then go out of the spec, and if none the the MF-HTTP stuff has been imeplemtned it goes into a note wholesale.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

Received on Wednesday, 15 June 2011 21:40:29 UTC