- From: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
- Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 20:51:30 +0000
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@gbiv.com>
- cc: Patrick Pelletier <code@funwithsoftware.org>, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie>, ietf-http-wg@w3.org, perpass@ietf.org
In message <826E49BC-8F03-43DA-9B19-62F5C999B5C1@gbiv.com>, "Roy T. Fielding" w rites: >One could argue a lot of things, but disabling the often-used >and very useful User-Agent string [...] How about making it intelligently usable instead ? Right now everybody wastes bandwidth claiming to be "Mozilla/5.0" with "Mozilla/4.0" being a distant second: root@phk:/usr/local/www/logs # grep -c Mozilla/4.0 thttpd.log 44445 root@phk:/usr/local/www/logs # grep -c Mozilla/5.0 thttpd.log 369977 root@phk:/usr/local/www/logs # wc -l thttpd.log 520850 thttpd.log with the result that those 12 bytes (incl the next SP) is just a total waste of bandwidth. HTTP/2.0 would be a great chance to stop this race to the bottom where everybody sticks everything they can think of into User-Agent in the hope that the dudes in the other end are incompetent enough to actually cater for broken browsers. If nothing else, putting a hard 32 byte limit on the string would be a BIG improvement, since that would force people to transmit only the necessary and useful information. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 phk@FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
Received on Friday, 13 September 2013 20:51:55 UTC