[whatwg] Access the Response Headers for the Current Document

[Ian Hickson]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Joseph Pecoraro wrote:
> 
> I originally helped someone in an IRC channel with this question.  He 
> wanted to check a "Date" header being sent from his server, via 
> Javascript.  I don't know what his exact reason was.  We provided him 
> the same solutions mentioned here.

Without knowing why he wanted that, it's hard to say what the right 
solution is.


> However, like Adam de Boor suggested, a use case could be detecting 
> proxies.

It's not clear to me why you would need to know that.


> The use case that I thought of was using custom headers to ensure 
> requests go to a certain server in a cluster, perhaps to maintain a 
> session with a reasonable cache.  But that isn't really compelling and 
> probably not very common.

That would be a use case for setting headers (not reading them). I'm not 
sure how that would work, really. There are many ways that pages get 
fetched, and it's not clear that we want to allow pages to affect future 
page loads... it's quite a complex can of worms I'd rather not open 
without a _really_ clear use case that can't be done any other way.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'