Dear Working Group Folks, I am not a member of the working group. But I have recently been tempted to "stretch" the HTTP spec, and I'm writing to inquire if what I'm doing is reasonable enough to eventually fold into the spec. Basically I'm sending a Retry-After header on a 20x HTTP response. I'm working with a "throttled" data service which rate limits connections. Clients are harvesting a huge volumes of data over time. Presently clients get some data with a 200 result, ask again right away and get a 503 response, then wait out the proper Retry-After time. If I can return Retry-After with the 20x result, it will cut the total requests in half. Clients can ask for data, and know immediately how long to wait before they ask again. Only a client that violates the timeout would ever see a 503. The HTTP/1.1 spec is pretty clear (in section 14.37) that Retry-After is for 503 and 3xx return codes only. Your thoughts? Where would I go to suggest an expansion of the Retry-After header, to be inclusive of 20x results? Is this a reasonable extension in your view?Received on Tuesday, 23 December 2008 04:52:24 GMT
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