Re: [apps-discuss] obs-date, was: APPSDIR review of draft-ietf-httpbis-p2-semantics-24

["Martin J. Dürst" <[e-mail]>]

On 2013/10/29 10:26, Amos Jeffries wrote:
> On 29/10/2013 8:22 a.m., John C Klensin wrote:

>> My understanding is that the HTTPbis work is a rather major
>> revision with at least some cases for which "get it right" is
>> more important that complete backward compatibility, especially
>> if there is a clear migration path.
>
> No. The focus on the WG has been to document what is actually *working*
> and clarify existing HTTP behaviour in order to encourage interoperability.

To clarify for people not too involved in the HTTPbis work:

The HTTPbis WG has two main work items:

1) Moving HTTP 1.1 to Standard. That's what all the drafts are about 
that are currently under review and discussion in apps-discuss. For 
people familiar with Internet mail, that's somewhat similar to the work 
that happened when moving from RFCs 2821,... to RFCs 5321,... As such, 
it doesn't leave much room for innovation or even fixing stuff that 
looks broken from the outside, and the HTTPbis WG was particularly 
careful to avoid any such breakage.

2) HTTP 2.0: This is a completely new protocol design, so there is quite 
a bit of room for "getting things right", and stuff like using integers 
for representing dates (because the protocol is binary) is being 
considered. This on many fronts allows cleanup similar e.g. to what 
happened in EAI (Email Address Internationalization), because there's no 
deployed base to worry about. But HTTP 2.0 is not yet ready for general 
review.

Regards,   Martin.