Re: Content-MD5
Rich Salz (rsalz@osf.org)
Sun, 5 Nov 1995 22:01:11 -0500
So much for hope.
Look, Ned. Without thinking much I came up with four examples where the
IETF has RFCs on "competing" standards, and without thinking hard I named
several. Your followup was non-responsive. One isn't your area of
expertise but you challenged me anyway, one you got wrong (Usenet, not
UUCP mail), one you don't undersatnd the history of (SNMP), and one where
I was sloppy in that I talked about character sets without enough context,
apparently, for you to see that I was talking about all the charset
definitions and transport issues that are floating around.
I have email from Scott Bradner that says the IETF has a history of
adopting competing standards.
>In other words, you don't care enough to bother to try and reconcile the
>two different schemes. That's fine with me, but surely you see it is this
>sort of attitude that has led to the present situation?
I don't understand how you could come to such an understanding. I know
that you saw my question on convergence statements and subsequent response.
HTTP probably wants an extensible scheme that support multiple hashes in
a single header. Email has Content-MD5 as existing practice. I had
discussions with one of the RFC authors and was convinced that better
language standardizing common practice was a good thing, in spite of the
fact that my implementation experience (arguably the first in widespread
Internet use) showed it to be less than optimal. Again, this is just a
summary of my previous messages on this topic, easily verifiable from the
archives.
/r$