Re: URI Templates - optional variables?

On Oct 16, 2007, at 2:11 PM, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> On 17/10/2007, at 3:06 AM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
>
>>> Ceterum censeo: in my view the templates would benefit from an  
>>> easier readable syntax.
>>
>> Easy to read by whom?  I went through the readable bits with HTTP
>> and it turned out to be a big mistake.  Nobody reads HTTP in real
>> practice, yet the overhead of parsing HTTP messages is huge.
>
> I do, and my developers do; it greatly helps them understand and  
> debug the protocol.

You don't pull out your trusty text editor and watch the
stream go by -- you filter it through a protocol analyzer that maps
the packets to a stream of text.  The same analyzer can map the
application level as well.  The benefits of an ASCII protocol are
a total myth aside from the framing issue: it allows most transport
errors to occur unnoticed, and hence seems like it works better than
a protocol that would report the error.

Yes, I still use telnet to test web servers, but that is not real
practice.  I could just as easily test with a perl filter.  Let's
focus on real protocol benefits, not imaginary ones.

> WRT parsing overhead -- commodity hardware can easily saturate a  
> gigabit Ethernet with 1K responses to GETs. "Huge" is an  
> overstatement.

I've done the traces -- the amount of time spent looking for CRLFs
in line-oriented headers is quite painful for server developers.
But this has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

....Roy

Received on Tuesday, 16 October 2007 21:59:04 UTC