RE: Compatibility requirements

[Paul Hoffman / IMC <phoffman@imc.org>]

At 02:37 AM 1/18/00 -0800, Andrew Draper wrote:
> >      It should be possible to build a caching server which does not
> >      understand the language set in which a request (or response) is
> >      encoded, and which works as well for IDNs as in the ASCII-only
> >      case.
> > Again the question of the definition of a "caching server". Also,
> > I have never seen the term "language set". I cannot understand what
> > this requirement means; can we delete it or combine the meaning in
> > the previous one?
>
>Since this was derived from one of my requirements I have to confess that I
>made up the term "language set".  What I meant this to mean was that a) if
>we specify a protocol which uses language tagging those tags should be
>opaque to a caching server and b) if we specify a canonicalisation algorithm
>the caching server should perform correctly* regardless of how much (or how
>little) of that algorithm it has implemented.

I agree with requirement (a) and its wording. Let's not invent new terms 
like "language set". As for (b), the requirements doc should not be 
requiring the canonicalization; the protocol doc should.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium