Re: MUST use Content-Base
Roy T. Fielding (fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu)
Tue, 13 Jan 1998 13:21:10 -0800
>So therefore changing the MAY to MUST breaks HTTP/1.1 proposed standard
>compliant implementations which choose to honor the may, as is their right,
>by ignoring the header.
Sorry Yaron, there is no MAY in the Content-Base definition of RFC 2068
aside from the optional decision of the server. If the browser does not
implement Content-Base as specified, then the browser is not compliant
with HTTP/1.1 as specified in RFC 2068. Scott's proposal was merely a
clarification.
If, on the other hand, you want to argue that Content-Base is not going
to be implemented, and therefore should not be in the HTTP/1.1 standard,
then that's a valid concern.
When I was rewriting the URI specification and arguing with the MHTML
group, I came to the conclusion that Content-Base is not needed provided
that Content-Location is implemented as specified. The reasoning was
similar to what Dave Morris mentioned: the only person capable of knowing
whether or not the embedded references in a document are relative to
some other namespace is the document creator, and they are better-off
making that distinction within the document. Granted, some formats may
not have the equivalent of HTML's BASE, but I would argue that those
formats are very unlikely to contain relative references.
Does MSIE implement Content-Location as specified? Note that this
will eventually be very important, since it enables the reduction of
external redirect messages for internally redirected content.
....Roy