At 10:40 PM 10/19/1999 +0000, Kriss Andsten wrote:
...
>Some way of negotiating the data would be spiffy, speaking of bloat.. if
>the client side feels like sending its local timestamps in binary, or
>'negotiate away' some field or functionality, that certainly wouldnt
>-hurt-.. ...
Except for the bloat, of course... 8:] If the fields are labelled it is
possible to unilaterally send fields which otherwise have to have their
content and syntax negotiated. Negotiated feature sets often seem to send
their designers and implementers to a world of pain (a.k.a. Geneva,
Switzerland). If you can negotiate options, can you negotiate that you
want one set if some particular option is available and another if it
isn't? Express preferences for options? Who gets to decide which set of
options is actually used? Can it be asymmetric?
All these things can be useful, but we're at an awful early stage of
development to be signing up for a lot of complexity.
bob
