Subject: Issue 188, was: Content/Transfer-Codings organization/IANA considerations (issue 143, 188, 189)

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 16:27:55 +0200

Julian Reschke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just spent some time looking at issue 143, which is about updating 
> both IANA registration procedures and the registry contents.
> 
> While doing that, I noticed that there are more changes we should do:
> 
> 1) find an RFC 5226 defined IANA policy for the registration
> 
> Note that <http://www.iana.org/assignments/http-parameters> currently says:
> 
> "First Come First Served with specification recommended"
> 
> while RFC 2616 did state:
> 
> "New content-coding value tokens SHOULD be registered; to allow 
> interoperability between clients and servers, specifications of the 
> content coding algorithms needed to implement a new value SHOULD be 
> publicly available and adequate for independent implementation, and 
> conform to the purpose of content coding defined in this section."
> 
> (so no mention of first come first serve)
> 
> (new issue: <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/188>)
> ...

We discussed this in Stockholm, and consensus in the room was that we 
want to require a specification plus expert review (see RFC 5226, 
Section 4.1).

I have rephrased the sections in Part 1 (Transfer Codings) and Part 3 
(Content Codings) accordingly; see 
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/670>.

BR, Julian

---

From: Julian Reschke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:59:49 +0200

Julian Reschke wrote:
> ...
> 2) After splitting the spec we define gzip/compress/deflate in Part 3, 
> although they can also act as Transfer-Codings (Part 1). Moving them 
> into Part 1 would thus put them all into a single place.
> 
> (new issue: <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/189>)
> ...

Done with revision 
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/changeset/673>.

There was One More Thing related to Transfer and Content Codings we 
discussed in Stockholm: the individual codings are really independent of 
the context they are used in, as RFC 2616 already stated:

"Although the value describes the content-coding, what is more important 
is that it indicates what decoding mechanism will be required to remove 
the encoding." -- 
<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#rfc.section.3.5.p.3>

So they really should be defined separately from Transfer-Coding and 
Content-Coding, and be collected in the same registry (surprise: IANA 
already has both in "http-parameters").

Feedback appreciated...

BR, Julian