Adam Roach's No Objection on draft-ietf-httpbis-early-hints-04: (with COMMENT)

Adam Roach has entered the following ballot position for
draft-ietf-httpbis-early-hints-04: No Objection

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COMMENT:
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The document contains the following text: "a server might refrain from sending
Early Hints over HTTP/1.1 unless the client is known to handle informational
responses correctly."  This supposition does not indicate how a server might
know this, and therefore implies that servers should engage in user-agent
sniffing for guessing feature support. User-agent string sniffing is a
well-known anti-pattern, and not one that we should be encouraging.

My recommendation would be inserting an indication in the request to indicate
client support of the 103 status code, which would serve the dual purpose of
avoiding the issues discussed in the Security section as well as not taking up
unnecessary bandwidth for the 103 itself when its contents will go unused.

Received on Tuesday, 1 August 2017 23:19:36 UTC