Links

• Mozilla Module Ownership - via Mitchell Baker
• Community phases^? - from Community plan

Reading

• Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture What HTTP got right and what it didn't get right. Here are things they got wrong:
  • Not all messages were self-descriptive, but self descriptive messages was a goal
  • Early versions of HTTP, didn't send a complete URI, but assumed the host and port
  • Use of single level MIME encoding instead of a layered encoding scheme for representations. The key missing thing was the ablity to determine the type of nested content without decoding the data. Also a separation between content and transfer encodings resulted.
  • Difficulty in communicating characteristics of the representation during content negotiation. Leads to coarse grained communication
  • Inability to differentiate nonauthoritative responses (responses from intermediaries as opposed to origin servers)
  • Use of cookies instead of anonymous authentication plus true client side state
  • MIME syntax is unsuited for HTTP because it assumes a lossy transport

-- TedLeung - 24 Apr 2004