Re: Ambiguity on HTTP/3 HEADERS and QUIC STREAM FIN requirement

[Willy Tarreau <[e-mail]>]

Hi Lucas,

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 11:41:43AM +0100, Lucas Pardue wrote:
> Which leads me to a wild thought*. One could attempt to solve this problem
> in the HTTP framing layer, by introducing, via extension, a new
> pseudo-header ":no-content", which modifies the message exchange sequence
> in H2 and H3 such that no DATA frames are allowed after the first flight of
> header section. That solves the disjoin between the headers section and the
> ES flag or FIN bit. And would allow the receiving peer to make more
> concrete choices about whether to process a request early or wait a bit.

I think that it's an excellent idea to explore! The pseudo-header fields
were created to fill a gap and this is a perfect example of such a gap
where the HTTP framing doesn't sufficiently permit an agent to express
its intent anymore, and your proposal addresses this. The only thing is
that if we wanted to do something clean, it would have to be advertised
with the vast majority of GET requests, which is unlikely to happen in
the foreseable future. Regardless, I think it's worth continuing to
think around this.

> * It's Friday, so it's the day of the week I'm allowed to have these :-P

You're right ;-)

Willy