Subject: Gen-Art LC review: status-change-http-status-code-308-ps-01

From: Robert Sparks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 09:37:11 -0600

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I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this draft^H^H^H^H^Hstatus-change. For background on 

Gen-ART, please see the FAQ at

<http://wiki.tools.ietf.org/area/gen/trac/wiki/GenArtfaq>.

Please resolve these comments along with any other Last Call comments
you may receive.

Document: status-change-http-status-code-308-ps-01
Reviewer: Robert Sparks
Review Date: 11 Dec 2014
IETF LC End Date: 29 Dec 2014
IESG Telechat date: Not yet scheduled for a telechat

Summary: While 308 should move to Proposed Standard, this status-change 
document has serious issues, and should be reconsidered.

Major issues:

There is a conflict between this status-change document's statement that 
"the experiment is, therefore, over, and was a success" and the 
instructions to republish RFC7238 without change except to the boilerplate.

The status-change document argues that the successful implementation of 
308 in the vast majority of deployed browsers is sufficient to end the 
experiment.
If so, the guidance in a republished RFC7238 section 4 would be unclear 
(and inappropriate for general deployment on the Internet). Isn't the 
restriction in the second paragraph the essence of the experiment?

Specifically:
"Therefore, initial use of status code 308 will be restricted to cases 
where the server has sufficient confidence in the client's understanding 
the new code or when a fallback to the semantics of status code 300 is 
not problematic."

The intent of this status change is to move us past this "initial use" 
and loosen this restriction on application deployment is it not?

While I support moving 308 to Proposed Standard, I don't think this is 
the right way to do it, and recommend a draft that updates section 4 
instead.

(It might be tempting to address this (if people agree with it) by 
adding an RFC Editor note to the status-change rather than using a 
draft. Please don't.)

RjS

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From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2014 17:27:55 +0100

On 2014-12-11 16:37, Robert Sparks wrote:
> I am the assigned Gen-ART reviewer for this
> draft^H^H^H^H^Hstatus-change. For background on

Not really.

Just because we have now evidence that the new status code *can* be 
deployed doesn't necessarily mean that you can rely on it being 
supported. Think old browser versions, ancient command line tools, whatnot.

To me "Proposed Standard" means "we believe this can be implemented". It 
does not mean "it is implemented everywhere".

> the right way to do it, and recommend a draft that updates section 4

I agree that the text in Section 4 could use some fine-tuning, but I 
disagree that it should be dropped altogether,

> adding an RFC Editor note to the status-change rather than using a

Agreed. As a matter of fact we *did* start with a new draft 
(<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/draft-ietf-httpbis-rfc7238bis-latest.html>), 
but this was put on hold to run the experiment with the status change 
document...

Best regards, Julian