Re: [apps-discuss] I-D Action: draft-nottingham-http-browser-hints-00.txt

[Brian Pane <[e-mail]>]

Reading through the browser hints draft,
http://www.ietf.org/id/draft-nottingham-http-browser-hints-00.txt , my
first reaction is that it specifies a really arbitrary subset of
request headers that clients can be advised to stop sending.

While there's definitely some benefit to be gained by addressing
special cases like this, I think a general-case solution would be
preferable: a hop-by-hop response header that tells the client that
the server (or intermediary) supports compressed headers.  This would
require the definition of a compressed header standard, of course.

Of the specific headers covered in the draft, many have the same
values on every request: Accept, Accept-Charset, User-Agent.  Header
compression would be very effective for these and for some other
common headers: Host, X-Forwarded-For, and Accept-Encoding.  In
addition, Cookie and Referrer would benefit from compression in a lot
of common cases.

-Brian