Re: Last Call: <draft-ietf-httpbis-early-hints-03.txt> (An HTTP Status Code for Indicating Hints) to Experimental RFC

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2017-06-26 17:58, Yoav Weiss wrote:
> An issue <https://github.com/w3c/preload/issues/101> raised by Mike West 
> (CCed) got me thinking if Early Hints are at all implementable at the 
> browser level (rather than just used as early push hints at the CDN level).
> 
> Currently, at least in Chromium and WebKit, requests triggered by 
> preload links are not sent until the document is committed, which means 
> that they are not sent immediately when the browser processes them. 
> That's likely to be a short, internal delay.
> However, in the context of Early Hints, that delay can be significant, 
> as it can take hundreds of milliseconds for the renderer process to get 
> created. At the same time, a lot of the logic required to send those 
> requests out sits in the rendering engine.
> 
> I'm not sure what is the solution to bridge that gap, if one exists.
> 
> Cheers,
> Yoav

As the IETF HTTP WG, we can specify the bits on the wire that *allow* a 
client to start fetching things earlier.

*How* the client does that is an implementation detail of the client. If 
I understand the issue correctly, *any* mechanism that would send 
"early" information would have the same problem, right?

Best regards, Julian