Re: Last Call: <draft-yevstifeyev-http-headers-not-recognized-08.txt> ('Headers-Not-Recognized' HTTP Header Field) to Experimental RFC

[SM <[e-mail]>]

At 05:28 13-12-10, The IESG wrote:
>The IESG has received a request from an individual submitter to consider
>the following document:
>- ''Headers-Not-Recognized' HTTP Header Field'
>   <draft-yevstifeyev-http-headers-not-recognized-08.txt> as an
>Experimental RFC

These comments are not meant to discourage the author from bringing 
proposals to the IETF.

Version -01 of this draft was submitted on November 21.  It's not 
even a month and the draft is already at version -09.  I don' think 
that "commit early, commit often" applies to Internet-Drafts.  As 
this is probably the author's first draft going for Last Call, it 
would have been helpful to assign a document shepherd for the 
document to help the author with the IETF standards process.

As a nit, the intended status should be "Experimental".

 From the Abstract (draft-yevstifeyev-http-headers-not-recognized-09):

   "This document defines mechanism which allows HTTP servers to notify
    clients about not recognized or not proceed headers"

Shouldn't that have been "processed" instead of "proceed"?

In Section 1.1:

  "However, all hosts are not able to support all the HTTP headers."

Shouldn't that be HTTP servers?

 From Section 2.1:

   "If the HTTP host receives HTTP packet which contains some headers
    which are not supported by it, it is RECOMMENDED for it to include
    the Headers-Not-Recognized header in the response."

That could be rewritten as:

   If the HTTP server receives a request header field that it does not support

   "Intermediate systems (also called middle-boxes), such as proxies,
    tunnels, gateways etc. MUST transfer the packets with Headers-Not-
    Recognized field to the destination host without changing the entity
    of this header if the unrecognized header had been present in the
    initial HTTP request (i. e. request which intermediate system
    received before transferring it to destination node), but SHOULD omit
    it if Headers-Not-Recognized header entity concerns to header added
    to initial request by middle-box."

What do packets have to do with HTTP headers?

In his replies during the Last Call [1][2], the author mentioned that 
this header is useful for debugging.  I don't see any mention of that 
in the proposal.

Regards,
-sm

1. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg64867.html
2. http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg64838.html