Re: Working Group Last Call: Incremental HTTP Messages

I think the document is ready. It doesn't magically make incremental
delivery work, but at least message senders will have a mechanism to
express their preferences and intermediaries to identify them. That's
probably the best we can get for now and already very useful!

At the moment, the draft states that the Incremental header field takes
> "just one valid value, which is of type Boolean: "?1"." [1]
> To me it seems that, [..], we might want to allow the use of `Incremental:
> ?0`.
>

Without looking for precedence in other documents, I would shy away from
defining `Incremental: ?0` as I'm unsure what it should mean. A false value
could indicate that the message sender does not care about incremental
delivery and it's up to intermediaries whether to buffer or not. On the
other hand, it could also mean that the sender explicitly does not want
incremental delivery and that intermediaries should buffer (for whatever
reason). These definitions are slightly different and by leaving it out of
the document, we don't have to concern ourselves with that question for now.

Thank you for working on this document!

Best regards,
Marius

On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 7:20 AM Kazuho Oku <kazuhooku@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 2025年10月15日(水) 11:01 Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net>:
>
>> Just a reminder, WGLC ends soon - please give your feedback (in
>> particular, whether you support publication).
>>
>
> As one of the coauthors, I support publication but that might not count.
> That said, I'm writing this email because I have one question.
>
> At the moment, the draft states that the Incremental header field takes
> "just one valid value, which is of type Boolean: "?1"." [1]
>
> Is this approach consistent with our precedence?
>
> Today, I was reading RFC 9297 and it allows the use of `capsule-protocol:
> ?0`.[2]
>
> OTOH, IIUC RFC 9213 prohibits the use of `no-store=?0`, stating that
> "no-store always has a Boolean true value" and that "implementations MUST
> NOT generate values that violate these inferred constraints." [3]
>
> To me it seems that, if we are to consider RFC 9213 as an exception that
> retrofits an old header field, we might want to allow the use of
> `Incremental: ?0`.
>
> But I do know if that is the case, hence asking on list.
>
> [1]
> https://httpwg.org/http-extensions/draft-ietf-httpbis-incremental.html#name-the-incremental-header-fiel
> [2]
> https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9297.html#name-the-capsule-protocol-header
> [3] https://httpwg.org/specs/rfc9213.html#syntax
>
>
>
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>
>> > On 28 Sep 2025, at 6:37 pm, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>> >
>> > Everyone,
>> >
>> > This email starts a working group last call for Incremental HTTP
>> Messages.
>> >
>> > See:
>> >  https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-httpbis-incremental/
>> >  https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-incremental-01.html
>> >
>> > Please send your review and comments in response to this email, and/or
>> file issues to https://github.com/httpwg/http-extensions/issues.
>> >
>> > This call will be open for three weeks until Monday, 20 October, 2025.
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> >
>> > --
>> > Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>> >
>> >
>>
>> --
>> Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> Kazuho Oku
>