- From: Luca Passani <passani@eunet.no>
- Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 12:46:48 +0100
- To: Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>
- CC: Francois Daoust <fd@w3.org>, public-bpwg-comments@w3.org
Hi Mark, I am not part of BPWG, but I followed the work of the WG very closely and I think I can provide some of the answers to your questions (Disclosure: I am the author of the Manifesto for Responsible Reformatting, http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/manifesto/ The Manifesto addressed the same issues CTG that is addressing with overwhelming support from the community, operators and a few key transcoder vendors too) comments (and answers) in-line Mark Nottingham wrote: > > * 4.1.5.1 "The theoretical idempotency of GET requests is not always respected by servers. In order, as far as possible, to avoid misoperation of such content, proxies should avoid issuing duplicate requests and specifically should not issue duplicate requests for comparison purposes." > > Existing proxies can and do already retry GETs; I'm not sure who you're trying to protect here. > They are protecting Novarra Inc. ( http://www.novarra.com/ ). "GET idempotency" is an excuse to kill a reasonable approach to test whether a website has a mobile experience ready for visitors or not. Proxies could make a request with unaltered HTTP headers, ascertain that there is no mobile experience ready for that device and move on to spoof the UA string for that site from that moment on (if there is a mobile experience in place, then their intervention is not needed and in fact totally undesirable). The problem with this approach (for Novarra) is that this would not allow their proxy to fool the website and extort full-web content also in the presence of a mobile experience. Please also observe that "probing" is what some commercial proxies do (and performance is not an issues, because nothing prevents that a proxy caches the result of recent "probs" for a few hours). > My concern is that Recommending this document will cause more harm than good to the Web overall (even if it does represent a consensus of sort among a more limited community). I of course agree. Just wanted to observe how the "limited community" is in fact "very limited", since it only accounts for the needs of some transcoder vendors and Vodafone. The overwhelming majority of the mobile ecosystem hates transcoders and support for the aforementioned Manifesto proves this. Thank you Luca
Received on Tuesday, 24 November 2009 11:47:33 UTC