Subject: [alto] Protocol issue: mandatory vs. optional features

From: Enrico Marocco <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 27 Aug 2011 08:02:30 +0200

The current protocol model defines two basic mandatory-to-implement
sever-side features and three optional ones. A number of pros and cons
have been pointed out in recent discussions about both extending and
reducing the set of mandatory features and a few options have been
identified as a possible way forward, but none of them seems to have
strong consensus and more input from the working group is needed to make
a decision.

Track of the discussions can be found at the following links:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/alto/current/msg01151.html
http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/81/minutes/alto.html#proto

Possible options (please express and possibly motivate your preference):

  1. leave the current set of mandatory and optional features as is and
     let clients discover in the resource directory whether the one
     they need is supported;

  2. define "reasonably" easy-to-implement features (e.g. filtering) as
     mandatory, in order to encourage developers to add ALTO support to
     their applications;

  3. define all features as optional and let clients discover in the
     resource directory they need to retrieve anyway which ones are
     supported;

  4. other.

-- 
Ciao,
Enrico