Re: draft-ruellan-http-accept-push-policy-02 comments

[Stefan Eissing <[e-mail]>]

> Am 13.07.2016 um 07:14 schrieb Martin Thomson <[e-mail]>:
> 
> I think that this is a promising avenue of exploration for server
> push.  Clients clearly don't have enough ways to influence how the
> server pushes content.
> 
> I'm almost tempted to suggest that it be made experimental rather than
> proposed standard.  We yet really understand how push is going to be
> deployed enough to settle on a sensible set of policies.  The set of
> policies in the document seem reasonable, but we won't know until they
> are deployed in a range of places.
> 
> I am also unconvinced by the use of two header fields.  The
> Accept-Push-Policy header field is the only one that seems to have a
> real use.  Knowing what the server understands is of relatively little
> use.  More so given the nebulous nature of what is pushed when you
> consider cache-digest and other improvements.
> 
>> From what I can see, the most direct response to seeing that a value
> isn't supported is that a client would omit the header (or values from
> it) on subsequent requests.  But there is no real harm in repetition,
> especially when you would probably save more bytes by leaving the
> header unchanged and relying on header compression.
> 
> I think that Accept-Push-Policy needs to have a different name.  Right
> now, it implies content negotiation, but it's a bit of a stretch for
> me to imagine using it in a Vary header field.  If you remove the
> server's use of Push-Policy, then that's a better name for the request
> header field.

+1

I implemented this draft in httpd, although I do not know of a client using it. I agree with Martin about the header rename/removal. Furthermore, the value of "fast-load" seems not very helpful while "none", "default" and "head" are very clear and lightweight to implement on a server. I'd be especially interested to learn if clients see use cases for "head" or have any plans of using this.

-Stefan