multiple trailer sections, was: WGLC Review of HTTP (-semantics)

Am 01.02.2021 um 04:50 schrieb Martin Thomson:
> I just finished reading this and I have to say that this is very good.  It's a masterful work.  This is a difficult protocol to document, but this document is well-written, clearly organized, and precise.
>
> Well, precise to exactly the extent the protocol permits, it's a protocol with lots of warts that have accumulated over its history.  But each of those is uniformly well-treated with clear explanations.
>
> I raised a few issues and pull requests, but those were mostly minor.  I have just two comments that I think are worth raising at this level.
>
> 1. Multiple trailer sections
>
> The document describes trailers in a way that permits multiple field sections to be sent, starting from the point after the end of the header section following a final status code.
>
> This feature has not been implemented and deployed.  Worse, this feature *cannot* be implemented or deployed as there is no version of this protocol, or even an extension to the protocol, that allows this feature to be implemented.  Every current version either does not support trailers (0.9, 1.0) or only supports precisely one trailer section (1.1 with chunked encoding, 2, 3).
>
> I appreciate the design as a rational, well-constructed thing.  It is very crisply defined.  However, I don't think that it has any place in a document that purports to document an interoperable standard.
> ...

Context: <https://github.com/httpwg/http-core/issues/313> and
<https://github.com/quicwg/base-drafts/issues/3265>.

Seems that this was pushed out QUIC v1 because it's not defined by the
base specs. Pushing it out again of the base specs because it's not used
doesn't look totally reasonable.

Proposal to avoid confusion: state that it's not yet used in current
versions of HTTP and will require extensions.

Best regards, Julian

Received on Monday, 1 February 2021 06:54:34 UTC