Re: Should the specs be forked and maintained elsewhere?

Sure! And feel free to redirect to a different venue if we're getting off
topic. Off the top of my head:

   1. Most web developers are not aware that conneg exists. This is usually
   fine, since it's uncommon, but can be an unpleasant surprise when they
   first hit it and don't understand it.
   2. The `Accept` header is notoriously complicated to parse, generate,
   and fully comply with. Imo much of that complexity is unneeded in practice.
   3. It often breaks caching when it's first introduced. Internal and
   external caches generally ignore Content-Type and Accept (etc) by default,
   so when conneg is first introduced, clients often get the wrong response
   type. Developers learn the hard way that they need to add Accept to Vary
   and to their framework's cache.
   4. URLs leak across contexts. They may start out within a single service
   or API, but they gradually proliferate into user-visible links, object
   identifiers in other systems, add-on services, third party tools, etc.
   These generally don't know the original conneg requirements, which causes
   unpleasant surprises.

I think most of this boils down to: modality generally considered harmful.
When something always behaves the same way, it's reliable and easy to use.
When it behaves differently based on something far away in the environment
that you may not know exists, it's unreliable and surprising. Add in a very
large ecosystem of independent tools that all need to interoperate, often
in fine-grained ways, and you have a recipe for failure.

On Fri, Mar 24, 2023 at 9:42 AM Bob Wyman <bob@wyman.us> wrote:

> Melvin, Ryan,
> Could you provide at least a short summary of why "content negotiation"
> has not lived up to expectations? It is good to know that it is
> non-optimal. It would be better to know why.
>
> bob wyman
>
>

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