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Re: LC comments on draft-yevstifeyev-http-headers-not-recognized-08.txt

2010-12-14 15:29:35

On 15/12/2010, at 2:16 AM, Mykyta Yevstifeyev wrote:

Hello all,

Let me explain some issues which were mentioned by Mark.

14.12.2010 2:09, Mark Nottingham wrote:
The use cases for this draft are highly speculative and unproven, even for 
something aspiring to be Experimental. I haven't seen any implementers 
express interest in it.

The draft does not cover what it means for a server to "recognise" a header, 
yet it places a MUST level requirement on this; e.g., if a server doesn't 
actively use the "Via" header, should it list it as not recognised? What 
about X-Forwarded-For? Deploying this on a server as-is means that a lot of 
extra bytes will be sent in responses (and not just because the field-name 
is so long, although that doesn't help). If the client sends a 'Range' 
header but the server chooses not to sent a partial response, should it be 
listed? And so on...

Firstly, why do we speak about extra bytes to be transferred now, almost in 
2011? Does it seem to be a great problem?

I can point you at lots of people who work at Amazon, Yahoo, Google, Akamai and 
other large-scale Web development shops who are painfully aware of both the 
costs of bandwidth (especially in many non-US markets) and the effect of adding 
packets on end-user perceived latency. It matters very much.


And do you really think that there will be *a lot* of such bytes? Secondly, 
'doesn't actively use' does not mean 'not supports'. The examples you list 
are not appropriate for the situation we are discussing. I mean that if the 
server completely does not support one of headers the client sent, it'll form 
the corresponding response.

As it sits, it's impossible to say; your draft doesn't contain the word 
"supports" "actively use" or anything else to describe how this mechanism would 
work in practice, nor are there examples.


And when the client receives, it will avoid sending the corresponding 
header(s) - so, using this header will allow to save 'extra bytes', as you 
say, than spend them. The proposal has the opposite effect than you describe.

To achieve that effect, you have to get widespread support in both servers and 
clients. Have you had any discussions with vendors of either?

What are your goals here, overall? From previous discussions, I'd thought it 
was to provide a debugging mechanism. Here, you express interest in saving 
bytes. I suspect that having both as goals will be pulling you in different 
directions...

Regards,

--
Mark Nottingham   http://www.mnot.net/



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