draft-fielding-http-key-02 obvious shortcoming & failure

[Henrik Nordström <[e-mail]>]

Learnt about the Key draft today in another discussion about how to
cache Vary responses, and reading the document I see a noticeble
shortcoming and failure of the proposed algorithm.

In "2.2.4. "p": Parameter Prefix Match Modifier" you have

Key: Accept;p="text/html"

And a seemingly nice looking list of things it matches and do not match.
So far so good. But it will also match

Accept: text/plain;q=0

which is the opposite. Here the client says it do not accept text/plain.

same issue applies to any other header using quality attribute.

It also fails to represent quality selection among different variants in
general. I.e. when there is both text/html and text/plain versions and
one client prefers plain, the other html but both can process both.

Regards
Henrik