[whatwg] Comments on the XMLHttpRequest::setRequestHeader spec

Christian Biesinger cbiesinger at web.de
Wed Nov 10 14:07:02 PST 2004


Hi,
following comments are about
http://whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#setrequestheader

Note: This list was assembled from a list of headers Mozilla sends 
during a normal page load request.

- This Spec does not allow sending a User-Agent header, is that intended?
- it implies that the request does not contain a referrer (though that 
may be the intention)

Then, two content-negotiation issues:
- it prohibits sending Accept-Language
- it also prohibits sending Accept:
Since Accept-Charset and Accept-Encoding are allowed (and in fact are 
not overridable), why aren't these two allowed?

Some cache headers:
- While it allows If-Modified-Since, it does not allow sending 
If-None-Match! (i.e. validation via ETag)
- It also does not allow sending a Keep-Alive header 
(http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2068.html 19.7.1.1)
- It does not allow a networking library who might have cached parts of 
the data to send a Range: and If-Range: header to complete the cached 
data, handing the requesting script still all of the data

These last three seem like implementation details to me... (i.e they 
should be allowed, in my opinion)

-biesi



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