Proposal for telling an implementation what adjacency info an app/service needs

[Carl Ollivier-Gooch]

Tim Tautges wrote:
> Questions:
> 
> 1) What's the mechanism for registering decisions on these proposals?  I 
> think we have several which have had tacit approval from everyone but 
> which haven't been registered yet.
> 
> 2) How is the example below different than the case I've tried to make 
> for string options?  In each case, the implementation may or may not 
> respond to the request from the service/application.  It's just the 
> syntax or mechanism for specifying that request that's different, but 
> IIRC that wasn't a factor in the major objection to string options.

Actually the major difference is that a string option can be -anything-, 
whereas in this case the argument passes specific, tightly defined 
information.

That's both the strength and the weakness of a string option.  You see 
it mostly the strength side of that, because it opens a door to any 
non-general behavior that an implementation may choose to add.  I see 
mostly the weakness side of it, because it opens a door to any 
non-general behavior that an implementation may choose to add.  (No, 
that wasn't a typo.)   The larger the range of possible behaviors --- 
some of which may be required for a service or app to function --- the 
harder interoperability becomes.

I think there's a convincing efficiency argument in this case.  I'm sure 
that true in others, as well.  I'd just prefer to see specific syntax be 
the preferred mechanism rather than a catch-all string argument.

Carl

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