[8458] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: What's next after the common log format?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Andrew Payne)
Fri Jun 23 21:14:16 1995
To: Ari Luotonen <luotonen@netscape.com>
Cc: www-talk@www10.w3.org
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 23 Jun 1995 17:52:14 PDT."
<199506240052.RAA10041@neon.netscape.com>
Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 21:09:57 -0400
From: Andrew Payne <payne@openmarket.com>
>> The current format is positional, so there's no clean way to add new items
>> to the format without breaking existing tools.
>
>Many, if not most, of the current analyzers quietly ignore extra
>entries after the last field in the Common Log Format, so it's
>possible to add new fields there.
I was really getting at cases where you had two (or more) server modules
want to log information (say SSL and S-HTTP). If you just tack new stuff
on the end of the line, then tools that know about one type of log
extension information will break when they encounter a request with
information from the other type.
You could tag the extra entries with enough info for tools to distinguish.
The generalization of this idea is some sort of name-value format.
-andy
