Subject: new issue: remove redundant MUST obey xrefs

From: "Roy T. Fielding" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2007 14:36:38 -0700

RFC 2616 sections 9.5 (POST) and 9.6 (PUT) have the following
useless waste of bits

    POST requests MUST obey the message transmission requirements set  
out
    in section 8.2.

    See section 15.1.3 for security considerations.

and

    PUT requests MUST obey the message transmission requirements set out
    in section 8.2.

respectively.  They can be safely deleted without changing HTTP.

Section 8.2 is not specific to PUT and POST.  Likewise, a content-free
forward pointer to just one of the many subsections on security
consideration is a total waste of brain cells.

Those are just two examples of what can only be described as a
spaghetti style of content-free cross-references within the spec
that make it very hard to read.  They should be removed in general
at the editors' discretion.

....Roy

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:25:09 +0200

Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> ... 

Totally agreed. I would even call them harmful, not only because they 
take up valuable space, but also because an attentive reader might 
wonder why the same statements aren't made for other methods as well.

That being said, there are people who seem to like repeating stuff all 
over the place, so it seems to be a good thing nevertheless to link 
these kinds of changes to an issue entry that explains the reason behind 
that change.

(<http://www.w3.org/Protocols/HTTP/1.1/rfc2616bis/draft-lafon-rfc2616bis-latest.html#rfc.issue.duplicated-text-wrt-msg-xmission-reqs> 
in the latest edit)

Best regards, Julian