Re: HTTP Browser Hints.. feedback?

On 12-07-16 20:00 , Mark Nottingham wrote:
> A new RR will effectively mean that you have to run your own DNS to use this; while this isn't a problem for big sites, I'd like small sites to be able to use it if they wanted to, without going to extreme lengths.
>
> I think either a TXT record or a VERY small HTTP response header would work; e.g.,
>
> HTTP/1.1 200 OK
> Hints: 1
>
> (to be effective, the Hints header would have to be sent on every response; not optimal, but it is just 10 bytes.)_
>
> Both could also be an option, to give sites a choice.
>
> What do you think?
>
>
How do you differentiate between "small" and "big" sites? I'm under the 
impression that most "small" sites are hosted off shared webservers at 
some hosting provider (e.g. dreamhost). If that's the case, then those 
sites aren't actually in control of the httpd (or nginx/IIS/whatever) 
instance that is running their website, and so cannot really provide a 
reasonable hints file anyway.

Come to think of it, I think that's a pretty key point that's been 
missed so far - using an HTTP hints file assumes that the content 
provider (the people who supply the HTML) know about the specific 
configuration that is optimal for the infrastructure they're running on 
(web server, round-robin load balancer, etc.). For "small" sites who use 
an external hosting provider this assumption doesn't hold, and assuming 
it does can only lead to bad things. For example, the hosting provider 
could change some apache config and all of a sudden clients can't 
connect to a site any more because the site owner specified small-hdrs: 
true or pconn-ip: true in their hints file.

Given the nature of the hints listed at 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-nottingham-http-browser-hints-03 I 
think it is more reasonable to give control of the hints file to whoever 
is in control of the web server and related infrastructure, because 
they're the ones who best know what those values should be set to. 
Putting it in the DNS is closer to this but still not ideal (for example 
with dreamhost I can add/edit custom DNS records for my domain even 
though I don't have that much control over the apache config).

kats