[apps-review] apps-team review of draft-bryan-metalinkhttp-19

[Yves Lafon <[e-mail]>]

Dear authors,

I have been selected as the Applications Area Review Team reviewer for
this draft (for background on apps-review, please see
http://www.apps.ietf.org/content/applications-area-review-team).

Document: draft-bryan-metalinkhttp-19
Title: Metalink/HTTP: Mirrors and Cryptographic Hashes in HTTP Header Fields
Reviewer: Yves Lafon
Review Date: 2011-01-28
IETF Last Call Date: 2011-02-18

Summary: This draft is almost ready for publication, but has a few small
editorial fixes, and possibly needs some minor clarifications.

Major Issues: None

Minor Issues:

In section 3,

Remove
[[Some organizations have many mirrors.  Only send a few mirrors, or
   only use the Link header fields if Want-Digest is used?]]
and add something along the lines of "As some organizations can have many 
mirrors, ..." in front of the next paragraph.

Also "network proximity" might be a decision choice for the set of mirrors
that might be returned.

In section 3.2
Did you consider exposing the ASN of the mirror network prefix would be a 
good option on top of Geographical Location? It is not uncommon to have 
better bandwidth between two countries than between two ISPs in the same 
country.

In section 6.
<<
If Instance Digests are not provided by the Metalink servers, the Link 
header fields MUST be ignored.
>>
Clarification about what needs ot be ignored:
"the Link header fields pertaining to this specification MUST be ignored"
to avoid any zealous reading of the text.

In section 7.
It might be good that if any Ranged requests generated after the first 
request ends up with a complete response and not a partial one (as servers 
might not support HTTP ranges) then all but the fastest connection must be 
closed. The other option would be to add a requirement in 2. that 
Metalink servers and mirrors MUST support HTTP Ranges (which would be a 
better way of solving the issue).

Also I noted a dependency on 'draft-ietf-ftpext2-hash' in the Normative 
References section.

Nits:

In section 3. last paragraph and 7.1.1 6th paragraph, "fieldss" -> "fields"
In section 6. "Cryptographic Hashes of Whole Files",
               "Files" might be replaced by "Documents"

Thanks !

-- 
Baroula que barouleras, au tiéu toujou t'entourneras.

         ~~Yves