4 ms·
The fact of the matter is that what-a-resource-is includes the headers it is served with and the context in which it is requested. Consider https://lcamtuf.cor
by svieira 4y ago
The fact of the matter is that what-a-resource-is includes the headers it is served with and the context in which it is requested. Consider https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/squirrel/ https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/squirrel/
It may not be normal in your day-to-day work, but it's definitely an important point of extensibility. Extensibility is indeed opposed to management (see _The Principle of Least Power_ for more on that front) but that is a trade off that worked really well for the web for decades. I for one would be really sad to see this further limited and would love for browser support for `Link` header behavior to increase rather than decrease.
- javajosh 4y agoBy that reasoning content-length should include headers. Needless to say you have not changed my mind. There's never going to be a hard and fast rule distinguishing headers from content. It's all just data after all. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to eliminate the distinction entirely. It's almost as if software engineers are doomed to this pendulum of constraining and then under constraining. It happened with SQL and noSQL and it seems to be happening now with HTTP. Constraints are for your own benefit but maybe it takes time to really grok that.
- afandian 4y agoAt a cursory search, Link appears in 1996. It was there before CSS. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#appendix-D.2.6 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1945#appendix-D.2.6
- javajosh 4y agoWow, you're right! Good that it was summarily ignored until now I guess.
- afandian 4y agoI fear we’re getting into xkcd 386 but… As svieira says above, Link is a standard thing. It’s widely used. CSS is even based on it. Another example is ‘canonical’. https://http.dev/link#canonical https://http.dev/link#canonical You may not have encountered it personally, but I don’t think it’s wise to extrapolate from that.
- javajosh 4y agoI've been making websites since 1996 and I've never seen it. Not once.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoNo, content and the resource are two different things. The resource is the content and its metadata. Content length is what it says.