RFC for mediator warnings

Hi all,

Please could someone make this an RFC or something?  (My access gateway 
now implements it, although the update might not have propagated to all 
copies if you're reading this the same day I wrote it.)

====================================================================
Standard for Mediator Warnings
(Proposed by Silas Brown, 28th February 1999)

A "mediator" is defined as any program that acts as a proxy (whether or 
not it is actually implemented as a proxy) with the purpose of modifying
HTML in some way.  This standard enables HTML documents to embed warning 
messages for users of specific mediators.  Mediators conforming to this 
standard should add these warning messages at the top of the page; other 
mediators and normal browsers should ignore them.

An example of its use is that a mediator can embed a message for itself 
or for other mediators, warning about redundancy, but there is nothing 
to stop messages from being embedded in static documents.

A MIME header can contain an arbitrary number of X-Mediator-Warning 
lines.  The syntax of each line is:

X-Mediator-Warning: name=message

where 'name' is the canonical name of the mediator and 'message' is the 
message that this mediator should display.  Any mediator that supports 
this standard should add its canonical name to the MIME header of any 
page it returns, using the following syntax:

X-Mediator-Name: name

Canonical names are not case sensitive.  They are formed from ASCII 
characters between 33 and 126 inclusive, except 61 (the '=' sign).  
No spaces may be added before the '=' sign.

Both of these can also be done in the HEAD of the document itself, using 
META tags, as follows:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-Mediator-Warning" CONTENT="name=message">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="X-Mediator-Name" CONTENT="name">

None of the above is case sensitive.

Notes:
1.  It is left unspecified whether or not messages may contain HTML 
tags, since this depends on the context of the mediator.  This standard 
does not guarantee that mediators implementing it will leave HTML tags 
untouched, or even process them sensibly.

2.  Messages are unformatted.  It is assumed that, if several 
X-Mediator-Warning lines are present, each one is a different warning.  
You should not begin a new X-Mediator-Warning line to insert a line 
break.

====================================================================

Regards

-- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://epona.ucam.org/~ssb22/

"Anyone inexperienced puts faith in every word, but the shrewd one
 considers his steps" - Proverbs 13:16

Received on Sunday, 28 February 1999 07:16:39 UTC