Subject: RE: The original specs and notes on them.....

From: "Hallam-Baker, Phillip" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:30:41 -0800

> From: Harald Alvestrand [mailto:[email-masked]] 

>    The IESG has concerns about this protocol, and expects 
> this document
>    to be replaced relatively soon by a standards track document.
> 
> The biggest concerns (that I remember) were:
> - Over-consumption of IP addresses (fixed by the Host: header)
> - Over-reliance on short TCP connections (fixed by HTTP 1.1 keepalive)
> - Use of "TCP end of session" to delimit documents (fixed by 
> use of length field + HTTP 1.1 chunked encoding)

That is not why the length field was introduced. I introduced it into the
spec after I attempted to use the POST method in April 1993. I did not know
of the existence of the IESG at the time. It is unlikely that they were
controlling my thought processes.

As originally specified the sender advertised the end of the POST data by
closing the connection, thus preventing access to the response code.

As a matter of fact 1945 actually includes Content-Length. I presented
Keep-Alive at the 1st Web conference in 1994. The problem with
Content-Length was that it is a header and has to be pre-computed, hence
chunked.

The wider point though was that HTTP/1.0 was known to have issues. Everyone
accepted the fact that improvements. The point of publishing 1.0 was to
attempt to kill off 0.9.

The notices in the HTTP drafts were not objected to by any of the authors as
I understand it. So the claim being made in this somewhat bizzare appeal is
somewhat misinformed. There were real issues that arose between the Web
developer contingent and the old-guard IESG. This is not one of them.

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