Ftp-WG: Re: comments on the MLST draft

At 02:24 AM 4/30/2002, you wrote:
>     Date:        Mon, 29 Apr 2002 23:30:57 -0500
>     From:        "Gregory A Lundberg" <[email protected]>
>     Message-ID:  <[email protected]>
>
>   | 300 is appropriate, but actually specifying 300 breaks all those existing
>   | implementations and ..
>
>Yes, that was what I thought - for this, the intent was just to (finally)
>document what actually exists, and has done for a long time.  The WG spent
>essentially no time trying to think of ways that restart could be "fixed"
>or improved, or altered at all - at this late stage, I doubt that there
>is much real interest in doing that, here anyway.

There's so many working implementations out there, in client and in server, 
that to define a new protocol element for resuming that was fundamentally 
incompatible with the existing implementations would have likely led to the 
same situation that we have with FTP URLs - the RFCs say one thing, and the 
implementations completely ignore it.

RFCs have a long and cherished history of documenting that which has been 
implemented, and found to work.  Occasionally they document only that which 
has been found to work "well enough".  Changing the behaviour of REST at 
this point would be a waste of time - we'd end up with an RFC that muddied 
the water, rather than cleared it.

Alun.
~~~~

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