Re: AD review of draft-ietf-httpbis-http2bis-05

Hi Martin,

Thank you for all the updates, you can go ahead and merge them as soon as it’s convenient and submit the new version, so that reviewers from Last Call can read the latest version.

Re- dependencies to TCPbis – I am ok with not having it. Now that we have had the discussion, the wg is aware and I have not heard any voice in favor of updating the reference, so please keep it as is.

Re- priority signals: thank you, the text below and re-reading 5.3.2 helped me understand the hierarchy of possible choices. Mike also answered some of my confusion in https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/issues/1783#issuecomment-971693935 – up to you if you think it is useful to add some of that regarding what parts are still mandatory to implement, I’m fine either way.

Thanks again!
Francesca

From: Martin Thomson <mt@lowentropy.net>
Date: Monday, 15 November 2021 at 05:14
To: ietf-http-wg@w3.org <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: AD review of draft-ietf-httpbis-http2bis-05
On Sat, Nov 13, 2021, at 21:49, Francesca Palombini wrote:
> Hi Martin! Thanks to you and Cory for considering my comments, I know
> these were mostly straightforward, and sorry it was tedious, I do hope
> they bring some additional value, however small, to the document.

Only tedious because that's the nature of the job.  I do appreciate how clear and actionable your input has been.

> [...] the TCPbis doc currently sits with a big number of
> DISCUSS comments since end of September.

My opinion: we should drop the dependency unless TCPbis suddenly resolves things.  We can keep the pull request open until that happens.  We don't depend on any of the details of TCP, so it's OK to have an outdated reference.

>>> 7. ----- https://protect2.fireeye.com/v1/url?k=f7306dd5-a8ab54d0-f7302d4e-86d2114eab2f-88675e722e367ee7&q=1&e=00a5acd9-7b14-4397-8e3f-7688ec22c3fb&u=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fhttpwg%2Fhttp2-spec%2Fpull%2F983
>>I've added a reference to the priority deprecation text to the first of these newly deprecated fields.
>
> FP: Great, thank you. I had some questions about what part of the
> handling for priorities is still mandatory to support, following my
> reading of draft-ietf-httpbis-priority (see point 2 of
> https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/httpbisa/mLM0RujKL6ZXY4eQtbQo2Xomf7c/
> ). Maybe you could help clarifying it for me? I read this section as
> well as 5.3, and although the fields are defined, since they are
> deprecated there is no processing defined, except for errors. What am I
> missing?

I think that's a problem in the -priority draft more than this one, though maybe Section 5.3 could be a tiny bit clearer.

What this is supposed to say, and what I think that it does say, is:

~~~
 HTTP/2 signals are pretty bad, but no signals is almost certainly worse. So,

1. Use newer, better signals if you can.
2. Use HTTP/2 signals if you don't have anything better.
3. Use ANYTHING else in place of RFC 7540 default priorities.

"Use" being both send and receive.
~~~

I think that the priority draft wants to say the same thing, but you caught some unfortunate word choices that might make that less clear.  No doubt there are similar choices in this document that I'm just not seeing.