Re: SOAP IANA considerations

Hmm. I don't know if it's good/possible to maintain a registry of
*all* HTTP headers in use. The original intent was to assure
coordination between headers that were standardised (or Recommended,
etc.) by organisations like the IETF, W3C, OASIS, etc. to assure that
there are no collisions, and to clarify the process. Imposing the
requirement for these headers to be a reasonable fit into HTTP isn't
such a bad thing, IMHO.

Vendors, third parties, etc. would have three choices;
  1) meet the requirements by publishing an RFC
  2) use the HTTP Extension framework
  3) take their chances.

These are, of course, exactly the choices that they have today,
except that #1 isn't well-defined.




On Sun, Dec 16, 2001 at 05:29:02AM -0800, Koen Holtman wrote:
> 
> 
> OK, so we all want to promote interoperability, right?  But I am
> seeing a lot of disagreement in this thread about what rules for a
> HTTP header name registry would promote interoperability most.
> 
> As far as I am concerned it is crazy to try to use an IETF registry to
> force some minimal level of documentation requirements on all HTTP
> headers.  Implementing a new header is as simple as adding a line in a
> CGI script, and many people who have the need and ability to implement
> new headers will simply not care about getting formal IETF approval of
> their documentation, if they intend to publish documentation at all.
> 
> It would be useful if somebody ran a service which helps everybody in
> picking new header names that nobody else is using yet.  So in my
> opinion, the only way to maximally promote interoperability here is to
> have very low requirements for registration.  In principle the *only*
> requirement for registering a header should be the honest intention to
> start using this header in internet HTTP-type traffic.  Similar weak
> requirements already apply to the vendor mime type registry and the
> media feature tag registry.
> 
> Koen.
> 

-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Sunday, 16 December 2001 13:03:32 UTC