Re: Last Call: <draft-nottingham-safe-hint-05.txt> (The "safe" HTTP Preference) to Proposed Standard

[Matthew Kerwin <[e-mail]>]

On 28 October 2014 08:54, Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>
wrote:

>
> I would have no objection to this being published as an Informational RFC,
> to document existing practice. But to be completely clear, I was *not*
> being
> sarcastic when I compared it to
> ​​
> RFC 3514, because its intended semantics can
> be ignored by any web site operator that chooses to do so.
>
>
"If you were going to ask me if I wanted to use your 'safe mode', you can
assume I'd have said 'yes'" -- it's a pretty hard semantic to ignore, and
the cost of doing so is pretty small anyway. My suspicion is that if sites
already present the option, there'd be motivation to support the hint
(better UX, for one), and no reason at all to ignore it. And for sites that
never presented the choice, well, it's irrelevant to them.

It's not really existing practice, either. Yes, content servers providing
an option for consumers to receive whatever version/subset of the content
the servers consider "safe" (in whatever terms they've couched it) is a
thing, but allowing consumers to preempt the question is new, and that's
what's on offer. And this proposal does it in the simplest way, which can
easily be aligned with the sort of options currently in use (and into the
future).

​I think there's value in it being a proposed standard.

-- 
  Matthew Kerwin
  http://matthew.kerwin.net.au/