Re:Why I Tend Not to Use Content Negotiation
by Joker_vD on Monday November 20, 2023 @09:02AM
(#38348229)
See, the caching mechanism in HTTP/1.1 is actually quite nicely designed in the sense that you can completely ignore it: don't look at any caching-related fields, always pass the requests up and the responses down — and it will be correct behaviour. But when you start to implement caching, well, you have to implement it, even the inconvenient but mandatory parts.
Yes, I know (and personally experienced) that most clients forget to include "Vary" field, or don't know that it exists, or the problem that this header solves exists) but when they do include it, they actually mean it and rely on it being honoured, one way or another.
PS. By the way, 7230 is obsoleted, you're supposed to use 9112 now.
Re:Why I Tend Not to Use Content Negotiation
by brabel on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @07:04AM
(#38362517)
RFC-9112 is the current one, you're correct. But RFC-7230 is the "venerable" one and always will be.
Notice that this is the HTTP "Semantics" RFC, not the "core" one (Message and Syntax) which is the venerated RFC-7230 [1] which is indeed quite simple for such a widely used protocol.
This RFC only defines a handful of "header fields", almost all of which necessary for actually being able to "frame" (find the beginning and end, applying decoding if specified) the HTTP message : https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230#section-8.1
[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7230