Re: Server Push and Content Negotiation

[implementer hat]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 12:26 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:

> What do people think -- is this worth specifying? How are implementations
> currently doing this?


push is one way - negotiation doesn't make any sense and yet the
alternative to negotiation is some kind of sniffing. sniffing is awful and
is even harder here where you don't have a request to sniff - you'd have to
do some whole connection guess.

how would you push some feature that relies on conneg today - like webp or
brotli?

I think as a client realistically you have to wait for the response headers
and check them out to see if its an acceptable push. Whatever is in the
request headers isn't really enough for that - which is a bit of a change
from what I currently do.

fwiw, this was one of the reasons gzip was a mandatory-to-implement CE in
spdy and probably should have stayed. It meant you could reliably push it.
Doing so now is really just an assumption that gzip is a defacto standard.

Or this all might be another argument about the excessive complexity of
push - maybe that should be a document :)