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

[Henri Sivonen]

On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 4:13 PM, Matthew Wilcox <mail at matthewwilcox.com> wrote:
> Ahhh, ok. I was not aware that SPDY is intended to suffer from the flaws
> inflicted by the dated mechanics of HTTP. Is it really different semantics
> though? I don't see how it's harmful to enable resource adaption over SPDY
> just because browser vendors have decided that HTTP is too expensive to do
> it?
...
> I'm sensing the SPDY/HTTP identical-semantics standpoint may be a
> philosophical thing rather than technical?

Is it a philosophical or technical thing to suggest that it would be a
bad idea for a server to send different style rules depending on
whether the HTTP client requests /style.css with Accept-Encoding: gzip
or not?

SPDY is an autonegotiated by design invisible to the next layer
upgrade to how HTTP requests and reponses are compressed and mapped to
TCP streams. Of course it would be *possible* to tie other side
effects to this negotiation, but it doesn't mean it's sound design or
a good idea.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/