Re: Minimizing/avoiding User-Agent, was: SPDY Header Frames

+1... I was getting ready to respond to Julian's post with a "+1 YEAH!" but
then stopped and thought about it... using a URI, while potentially sound
in theory, would likely just end up with a different form of the same mess
we're in now. Reducing the User-Agent field to nothing more than a single
token with a version identifier seems to me to be the Least Bad Option.

- James

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 2:01 PM, Karl Dubost <karld@opera.com> wrote:

>
> Le 17 juil. 2012 à 16:40, Julian Reschke a écrit :
> > OMG; that sounds so sane that the only thing I can complain about is the
> "x-" prefixed header field :-)
>
> :) wait a minute
>
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.example.org
> Capabilities: <http://example.com/acmeCom/new/shiny/browser/23>
>
> What is happening when example.org meets the client
>
> 1.  for the first time, example.org might download the URI which might be
> huge. It means big latency for replying to the client with the right
> content.
>
> 2. to avoid that example.org will be clever, they will cache the
> capabilities file and do negotiation on the URI becoming an ID.
>
> 3. Some business will start by selling list of URIs and capabilities files
> (the thing which is happening), create Databases.
>
>
> * Some business will be abandoned. Databases will not be updated. Future
> fail
> * The cache system will not be maintained. future fail.
> * Some scripts will use the URL-ID (new useragent string) to block,
> filter, redirect.
>
> Basically exactly back to the same situation we have today.
>
>
> --
> Karl Dubost - http://dev.opera.com/
> Developer Relations, Opera Software
>
>
>