I'd like to make some comments on the HTTP draft recently published by the
IETF (draft-ietf-iiir-http-00.{txt,ps} dated 5 Nov 1993.
1) on the METHODS:
I'd really like to have a method called "GATE", which would be
followed by a URL and any other method.
This would allow servers to only open a connection to the specified
host/port, send the "real" method and information from the requestor
and send back the answer without having to further interpret the
data. Using the URL with the GATE method allows for access restrictions
on the server side based on protocol (i.e. allow all http requests
regardless the port number they use).
2) I have thought on some mechanisms providing help in administering
HTML documents.
Using the "Referer:" field of the request a server may detect
originators of bad links (as already stated in the draft).
How about some protocol, at best UDP based I think, that would allow
servers to exchange this kind of information.
If a server detects such a bad link and has a requestor field it
could send a datagram to the originating server. It could look like
BADLINK <requested URL> <originators URL>
Maybe we could get UDP port 80 for this (dunno whether this is already
allocated by some other service). Server could then save this information
to some logfile and/or notify the servers admin.
Maybe we could have another HTML+ tag like <TITLE> that could be
called <AUTHOR> and contain a email address of the author(s) of the
document. This could be passed along with the request maybe in a
"Author:" field or (if not present within the document) a server could
send back the email address(es) of the Author of a document along
with the response code or input it in the stream of a html document
(which I think would be bad, as the server would have to interpret
the document in some way).
Bye
\Maex
-- ______________________________________________________________________________ Markus Stumpf Markus.Stumpf@Informatik.TU-Muenchen.DE