Subject: I-D Action: draft-saintandre-xdash-02.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2011 08:55:10 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

	Title           : Deprecating Use of the &quot;X-&quot; Prefix in Application Protocols
	Author(s)       : Peter Saint-Andre
                          D. Crocker
                          Mark Nottingham
	Filename        : draft-saintandre-xdash-02.txt
	Pages           : 11
	Date            : 2011-07-11

   Many application protocols use named parameters to identify data
   (media types, header fields in Internet mail messages and HTTP
   requests, etc.).  Historically, protocol designers and implementers
   have often distinguished between &quot;standard&quot; and &quot;non-standard&quot;
   parameters by prefixing the latter with the string &quot;X-&quot; or similar
   constructions (e.g., &quot;x.&quot;), where the &quot;X&quot; is commonly understood to
   stand for &quot;eXperimental&quot; or &quot;eXtension&quot;.  Although in theory the &quot;X-&quot;
   convention was a good way to avoid collisions (and attendant
   interoperability problems) between standard parameters and non-
   standard parameters, in practice the costs associated with the
   advancement of non-standard parameters into the standards space
   outweigh the benefits.  Therefore this document deprecates the &quot;X-&quot;
   convention for most application protocols.

A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saintandre-xdash-02.txt

Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/

This Internet-Draft can be retrieved at:
ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-saintandre-xdash-02.txt