[Beacon] Required Beacon-Age: handling.

Hi,

we're currently considering adding support for Beacon-Age: to Blink's
implementation of navigator.sendBeacon() [1], which has generated some
questions surrounding this late addition:

 - When exactly is
https://w3c.github.io/web-performance/specs/Beacon/Overview.html#sec-processing-model
(step 11) supposed to be done & requestTime sampled? When the Fetch
request is handed to the next layer down in the network stack, at the
last possible opportunity (post-DNS lookups, ...) before the bits go
across the wire, .. ? Or are we free to sample that at whatever time
is convenient to the implementation?

 - Related to the previous, if an implementation doesn't provide
support for delaying transmission (or retrying), but is eager, the age
value will always be zero. Rather than transmit a header that conveys
no useful information (e.g., "Beacon-Age: 0"), would it be allowed to
leave out the header altogether? Both the Blink[1] and Gecko[2]
implementations do not currently support request delaying.

One might argue that Beacon-Age: serves an alternate purpose (that of
indicating "Beacon-ness" of the request), but perhaps that should be
relayed separately. It seems like we're currently promising a bit more
than what we can keep/communicate wrt Beacon-Age. Thoughts, comments?

--sigbjorn

1: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=398167
2: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1045222

Received on Sunday, 17 August 2014 17:18:36 UTC