[whatwg] RWD Heaven: if browsers reported device capabilities in a request header

[Matthew Wilcox]

I've asked Bruce Lawson (one of the Opera boys) about this, and it's not
likely to happen with HTTP. However, SPDY compresses headers as well as
multiplexes, and it's a much more realistic request to get useful headers
sent over a SPDY connection than it is over HTTP.

As for how useful it is - it's very very useful. Traditionally I don't
think the requirement to adapt content assets to device capability has been
that important, because other methods were available (including the
god-awful mess of the UA string). That's going to be less and less useful
as the variety of devices continues to balloon and the UA string becomes
less and less sane.

We need the server to know about the device. We need headers.



On 6 February 2012 10:27, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen at iki.fi> wrote:

> On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 9:28 PM, irakli <irakli at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Responsive Web Design [http://bit.ly/f6TPB7] is an extremely important
> > approach/technique/movement for making web mobile-friendly.
>
> It may look like it's the most important thing today, but most of the
> Web isn't and won't be doing it. What goes in every HTTP request
> affects the number of bytes transferred for all sites, though.
>
> Ten years ago, advertising XHTML support in every HTTP request seemed
> like the most important thing. And we got a bloated Accept header. (I
> was guilty of advocating that. I have learned since.) And how often
> did sites care? Very, very rarely. And once IE9 finally added XHTML
> support, it also added SVG-in-text/html support, which pretty much
> removes the need for application/xhtml+xml. It would have made more
> sense to get the major servers fixed so that Accept: */* would have
> become unnecessary and then to get rid of the Accept header.
>
> It's been less than a week sense we got rid of the Accept-Charset dead
> weight (http://hsivonen.iki.fi/accept-charset/) and you are already
> proposing adding more. Everyone wants to have a piece of the UA string
> or the HTTP request for their idea. None of those ideas are so great
> in retrospect.
>
> We should Just Say No to any and all proposals to add more stuff to
> HTTP requests.
>
> --
> Henri Sivonen
> hsivonen at iki.fi
> http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
>