Various comments on Current Draft of Guidelines

Here are some points that came out of yesterday's meeting and some
others for good measure (and a reminder that we agreed to review the
document on-list in order to progress things for a new draft) - my main
comments are on section 2 - I wrote the rest - so I'll leave for others
to comment on those bits.

Also a reminder on those who took actions, Magnus and Heiko, I think.


Section 2 Generally

I am not sure quite what the benefits are of separating the requirements
from the description of the behaviour. It might be more readable to fold
this section in to section 4 - use something like the current text in
section 2 to describe the generic behaviour desired then follow it with
the specification of the behaviour in section 4. 

Also there is no doubt an overlap between what is in section 2 and what
is in section 3 especially under the bit "the x needs to be able to tell
the y ..."

2.1.1 preferences

I am not clear what's meant by "service features" - I think we should
restrict our discussion to transforming features and I think we need to
be clear that those features come in 3 varieties: no-transform,
allow-optimize/re-encode, allow-reformat ...

Also I think we probably ought to be clear that a user agent would be
expected to select preferences on a per-request basis, whereas a user
would be expected to select them on a subscription basis.

When we say "user" how are we determining the identity of the user if we
are saying that user preferences must be remembered? I think we need to
be rather vaguer here and say that user interaction is in addition to
device interaction, though I agree that user interaction needs a
mention.

2.1.2 highest quality

Think that Magnus has an action on this. In short need to be careful
what we are saying. The highest quality image is presumably the biggest
with the greatest color depth. Whereas we need to distinguish the users
choice of a mobile representation vs a desktop representation. A mobile
representation will in most cases be a reduced width/height but maybe
not a reduced color depth.

User experience - think that we should use the terms "functional" and
"harmonized" user experience, per the Device Independence Glossary.

2.1.4 UA ID and Capability Disclosure

This reads a bit opaquely - we're saying that the proxy should allow the
user to control whether the CT proxy fakes the user agent and accept
headers or not, I think. In which case it's a user choice thing as
above?

And the second sentence says that it won't mess with the headers unless
the user has requested it?

2.1.5 original representation

This seems very technically challenging. How long is a proxy meant to
keep it for and how would a UA request the "original" cached copy ...

... more when I feel a little less unwell.

Jo

Received on Wednesday, 5 December 2007 16:23:05 UTC