> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Dilley [mailto:jad@pimlico.hpl.hp.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 20, 1999 5:04 PM
> To: wrec@cs.utk.edu
> Subject: 45th IETF WREC WG minutes
>
> Brian Carpenter: Status of WPAD: is it really a solution to a
> known problem?
> Is it a proprietary technology? May not be relevant to this document.
> Company submittals are OK but are different from (IETF)
> standard solutions.
>
I apologize for not being able to attend the meeting, but
I just wanted to comment on the WPAD draft comments. This comment from
Brian
begs for some explanation.
WPAD has its origins in solving the problem of configuring a web browser
to use a proxy automatically. This configuration hassle causes a
great deal of requests to corporate help desks as well as reduces
the number of clients that actually use the proxy, both to the
annoyance of IT staffs.
WPAD (or the idea )was originally discussed by myself and others (before I
came to Microsoft).
The actual beginning of the "WPAD" draft was initiated to address the above
problem
in late 1997. As indicated on the draft, it was co-authored by
collaboration between
Inktomi, Microsoft, Sun, and RealNetworks. The initial authorship was
driven
by Inktomi, a proxy vendor.
The resulting protocol makes use of a small implementation on the client as
well as use of DHCP, DNS and others. At present, with the release of IE5,
and inktomi's reference implementation source code, I know of 2
implementations,
by different vendors of the client side. Since any DHCP/DNS/etc server
theoretically
can be used for the server component, there are a multitude of servers which
meet
the needs of WPAD's server side.
To be clear, there is nothing proprietary about WPAD, it was designed
from the ground up as a collaborative effort, and there are a fair number of
implementations for its age.
In my mind, these are the things which make open standards. As such,
I would think that WPAD is standards track.
> A new WPAD
> draft has been resubmitted. It is implemented in ie5. It was
> not presented
> either.
>
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