Re: Fwd: New Version Notification for draft-jaju-httpbis-zstd-window-size-00.txt

[Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Mar 5, 2024, at 15:55, Nidhi Jaju wrote:
> The part that you mentioned about decoders being able to support a 
> different limit was added as an attempt to explain that deployments of 
> zstd operating in a private environment that don't care about 
> interoperability should negotiate it out-of-band. Maybe I could change 
> that text to something along the lines of:
>   "Decoders that wish to support a lower limit and encoders that wish 
> to emit
>   frames requiring a larger window size MUST negotiate the limit 
> out-of-band."

My email was a veiled suggestion that you delete the paragraph.

More generally, if you want to do something that is not the standard, then it is not the standard.  If you manage to make a private arrangement to do something other than the standard that's nice, but that doesn't need the blessing of the IETF.

However, if you make a private arrangement to do something other than the standard, but use the standard codepoints, that carries a pretty serious risk of damaging interoperability.  Private stuff escapes confinement.  We should not encourage people to do that (even if they regularly do).