- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Sun, 3 Nov 1996 23:05:58 PST
- To: yarong@microsoft.com
- CC: ejw@ics.uci.edu, w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
I'm not questioning the need for asynchronous progress notification. I'm questioning the need for a request header to ask for it. A simpler approach would be to say that servers should always send back progress indications for long-running requests with whatever frequency they deem reasonable to implement, and that clients should accept progress indications and ignore them if they want. If 100 Continue isn't adequate for what you want (and I suppose it isn't), propose a different response. # This sort of asynchronous notification solves a problem so fundamental # it has been built into just about every OS known to humanity. While I know of lots of progress-reporting mechanisms, I don't know any that are built into operating systems, and I thought that most distributed systems wind up inventing their own. Many networking protocols don't contain any such mechanisms even when they're needed. What is the asynchronous notification mechanism built into any of: Multics, MS DOS, Unix, Tenex, the Alto OS, MacOS, Windows? I don't remember anything like this in ONC/SunRPC, Grapevine, XNS Courier, SMTP, HTTP. FTP has a progress header, but its application is limited. Unless you're thinking of something else? Could you explain what you mean by 'built into just about every OS known to humanity'? Larry
Received on Monday, 4 November 1996 02:06:07 UTC