Re: Fwd: I-D Action:draft-loreto-http-timeout-00.txt

My initial comments...

There's quite a bit of overlap between the purpose of this I-D and the 
one I've been working on recently discussed on this list relating to 
progress notifications.

That raises a couple of questions for me.

1. Why not use a 1xx response to keep the connection alive?

This will keep intermediaries (including NATs) alive.  HTTP already 
mandates that HTTP/1.1 agents support this, empirical evidence has not 
been gathered about whether proxies typically block these or pass them 
through.

This would avoid the need to send a "NULL" response, close and re-open.

This also solves the issue where the server may not be in a position to 
ensure that a response is given within any timeframe communicated by the 
client, since the server can in any case send back a 1xx response.

2. Is this a use case for allowing entities on a 1xx response?

I'm sure this would break a heap of things, but perhaps the actual 
communication of the change in state could also be communicated in the 
1xx response, if not in an entity, then perhaps in a carefully formatted 
(experimental?) header.  Then multiple events could be signalled over 
the same connection.


Regards
Adrien



On 9/06/2010 2:12 p.m., Mark Nottingham wrote:
> FYI.
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>    
>> From: Internet-Drafts@ietf.org
>> Date: 9 June 2010 12:00:01 PM AEST
>> To: i-d-announce@ietf.org
>> Subject: I-D Action:draft-loreto-http-timeout-00.txt
>> Reply-To: internet-drafts@ietf.org
>>
>> A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.
>>
>> 	Title           : Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) Timeouts
>> 	Author(s)       : S. Loreto, et al.
>> 	Filename        : draft-loreto-http-timeout-00.txt
>> 	Pages           : 12
>> 	Date            : 2010-06-08
>>
>> A Timeout header is defined for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).
>> This end-to-end header informs an origin server and any
>> intermediaries of the maximum time that a client will await a
>> response to its request.  A server can use this header to ensure that
>> a timely response is generated.  This also identifies requests as
>> being potentially long-lived, and allows for better resource
>> allocation for these requests.
>>
>> A Connection-Timeout header is defined for HTTP.  This hop-by-hop
>> header informs the entity at the other end of a connection of the
>> maximum time that an idle connection is kept open.  This header
>> improves reliability by providing better information about the idle
>> connection management policy of HTTP hosts.
>>
>> Comments and feedback for this draft should be directed to the
>> authors and the Apps Discuss list (discuss@apps.ietf.org).
>>
>> A URL for this Internet-Draft is:
>> http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-loreto-http-timeout-00.txt
>>
>> Internet-Drafts are also available by anonymous FTP at:
>> ftp://ftp.ietf.org/internet-drafts/
>>
>> Below is the data which will enable a MIME compliant mail reader
>> implementation to automatically retrieve the ASCII version of the
>> Internet-Draft.
>>      
>>
>>
>>      
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> I-D-Announce mailing list
>>> I-D-Announce@ietf.org
>>> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/i-d-announce
>>> Internet-Draft directories: http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html
>>> or ftp://ftp.ietf.org/ietf/1shadow-sites.txt
>>>        
>>
>> --
>> Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/
>>
>>