Re: uh oh -- halp!

eostrom@mcs-server.gac.edu (Erik Ostrom)

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From: eostrom@mcs-server.gac.edu (Erik Ostrom)
Message-id: <9309091321.AA00404@mcs-server.gac.edu>
Subject: Re: uh oh -- halp!
To: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Thu, 9 Sep 1993 08:21:05 (CDT)
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
In-reply-to: <9309090528.AA09618@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu> from "Marc Andreessen" at Sep 9, 93 00:28:05 am
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>								HTTP0
> has served us well and is ideal for what it is (very simple, very
> lightweight, and very easy to build shell scripts around -- my
> proposed partial upgrade situation described above should leave those
> qualities intact)

Wait, I don't understand.  HTTP0 is just Gopher plus some extra
characters, right?  That is, the Gopher request

    <obscure_path_name>

and the HTTP0 request

    GET <obscure_path_name> HTTP/1.0

are functionally equivalent.

Yes, there are good reasons for wanting a protocol that is very
simple, very lightweight, and very easy to build shell scripts
around--but given that we have one already (with a far wider installed
base), I don't understand why we need to maintain an extra one.