[5252] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Caching Servers Considered Harmful (was: Re: Finger URL)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Behlendorf)
Mon Aug 22 18:00:46 1994
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 1994 23:54:05 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: brian@wired.com
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@wired.com>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>
On Mon, 22 Aug 1994, Daniel W. Connolly wrote:
> <rant>
> It's no wonder the WWW specs are so poorly maintained. You not only
> have to design, write, and edit the dang thing, but because folks
> don't actually read the specs (partly because they're out of date
> because nobody wants to edit them...), you have to watch the
> discussion to be sure that implmentors don't get the wrong idea and
> implement something else, because we all know that the specs don't
> really matter... the existing implementations are what really
> matter...
>
> AAAARGH! Do we really expect to build a large, complex, distributed
> hypermedia system with such lack of diligence?!?!?
>
> </rant>
*Many* times I've gone looking for specs related to HTTP/HTML issues,
scouring CERN, NCSA, using any and all robots, only to come up short - a lot
of what's there is poorly maintained, out of date, irrelevant, or pipe dreams
that never saw their way to implementation. Saying "it's in the hypermail
archive" isn't a help either, since short of reading a large chunk of the
messages I don't have a way of finding the information I need. Finally,
hardly any of these docs contain a last-modifed date, so I have no idea
how current they are. This is one thing I'm hoping W3O will make a
priority of fixing.
Brian
