“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Saturday, 24 December 2005
The useful end of RFC 3864 (at least regarding HTTP) is finally* here. When you need to know where a particular header is defined there’s now one place to do it; IANA’s Message header registry and repository have been filled with HTTP-related headers by RFC 4229.
The content was almost completely automatically generated, by scraping the pertinent information from the RFC citations, using cwm to infer some things about it, processing that n3 with a specialised script and then writing out the XML to feed into xml2rfc. Cool!
Special thanks to Graham Klyne for providing that script; it saved a lot of work. Thanks also to my co-author, Jeff Mogul, and all of the people who pointed out missing headers and problems.
* Next time I want to start a new registry, I’ll think twice; the first draft of this one was published just shy of four years ago!
Filed under: Web