Re: HTTP Futures

Christian Mogensen (mogens@CS.Stanford.EDU)
Thu, 01 Dec 1994 04:44:07 -0800

Fisher@tce.com writes:
>Well said. As long as the Web community does not allow governmental bodies
>(or groups in league with governmental bodies) to mandate the use of
>browsers that force their SOAP advice on users, the information on the Web
>will remain unfettered. Don't laugh too hard about the possibility of
>government mandates -- the U.S. political correctness movement would
>undoubtably love a government mandate forcing people to use browsers that
>permit only politically correct material to be viewed.

Remember, it's a WORLD wide web. Norway has different standards of
prurience than the U.S, and so on...

On the gripping hand: :-]
>On the third hand (as a Motie would say :)), if the Web software gets so
>complex that it cannot be written except by large corporations, a danger
>(hopefully remote) exists of the corporation(s) installing mandatory SOAP
>advice use to forestall legal problems ("my 12-year old daughter looked at
>http://www.playboy.com and is mentally scarred for life!").

Unlike the ISO (purveyor of the widely used X.400, X.500 and ISO/OSI models)
the IETF (AFAIK - feel free to shoot this down) has yet to come up with
an utterly unimplementable standard. In this regard, the net is quite
fortunate - methinks the prototype requirement has something to do with it.

Christian "Linux - the choice of a GNU Generation"