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Re: Last Call: <draft-snell-http-prefer-14.txt> (Prefer Header for HTTP) to Proposed Standard

2012-10-08 10:32:22
I am certainly open to alternatives on this particular point. The wait
preference has proven to be quite useful in environments where the latency
is low and predicable and there is good clock synchronization between the
client and server. Such conditions can be easily achieved when the
deployment environment is well managed. It does not work so well,
obviously, for arbitrary web clients running on mobile devices talking to
arbitrary servers. I never really intended wait to be used within such
environments, however.

I could drop the Date header recommendation altogether and stress in the
text that good clock synchronization and predictable latency is required
for the wait preference to be used effectively.

- James

On Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Martin Thomson 
<martin(_dot_)thomson(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>wrote:

On 5 October 2012 08:12, Julian Reschke 
<julian(_dot_)reschke(_at_)gmx(_dot_)de> wrote:
3.4.  The "wait" Preference
I'm not totally convinced that taking the Date request header field into
account is necessary given the additional complexity; what do others
think?

I said as much in my GenART review:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/gen-art/current/msg07790.html

Having had experience implementing this exact feature, relying on Date
isn't going to work.