Re: Working Group Last Call: Incremental HTTP Messages

On Thu, Oct 16, 2025 at 05:23:32PM -0700, Rory Hewitt wrote:
> ...and yet, to literally millions of people who are somewhat involved in
> the technical side of "the Internet", the words "downstream" and "upstream"
> are STILL commonly taken to mean "to the client" and "to the server". I
> think everyone on this list understands that.

FWIW I personally don't fully agree. I'm fine with this when speaking about
the response, not the request. For me "upstream" means "where it comes from"
and "downastream" means " where it goes". I guess that most users see it
like this when considering their view as a client retrieving an object. But
when it comes to HTTP messages, specifically requests, for me "upstream" is
the side which sends the request and "downstream" is the side I'm forwarding
it to. I've even found in the haproxy doc a paragraph saying that the logged
accept date should match the one found in an upstream firewall which passed
the request.

But yes, speaking of caches (which mostly focus on caching contents),
"upstream" and "downstream" intuitively focus on the response flow and are
used as you described.

Overall, I'd use these terms with caution depending on the context.

Just my two cents,
Willy

Received on Friday, 17 October 2025 03:29:34 UTC