Re: Statistics on reusing request headers in persistent connections

Jeffrey Mogul writes:
> That was a very nice study.  I'm sure people will find things to
> quibble about with your modelling of "wait chains", but it really
> does help to have some solid numbers.
Argee with one exeption:
Koen's modelling does not contain Accept-Language, which will be important
in future, adding some bytes to headers.
Currently only Lynx (2.4.2) supports Accept-Language from browsers which I use.
(I not tested the latest Mosaic for Linux, I not support ELF executables yet.)
Lynx adds 
Accept-Language: en; q=1
Accept-Language: *; q=0.1
which should be folded as:
Accept-Language: en; q=1, *; q=0.1
but really I want to see
Accept-Language: hu; q=1, en; q=0.75, ru; q=0.5, de;q=0.25
(60 bytes, including CRLF)
but unfortunately Lynx doesn't support that. (NOTE: I don't know, what is
the proper language tag for russian, I assumed "ru" but it is only a (bad) guess.)
Others may have a significantly longer list of languages.
While browsers and servers have only minimal support for Accept-Language, we
shouldn't expect too much URIs having variants in many languages, but I expect
more and more in the future. If a software vendor supports multiple languages 
in its products, it will be willing to run a multi-language web server.
> You write: [Koen Holtman]
>     Much higher gain/effort ratios can be had by focusing on other
>     desirable features of future HTTP software, for example
>     
>      [...]
>      - reducing the amount of Accept headers generated by some browsers
>        (my Mosaic for X browser sends 822 bytes of accept headers, most of
>        them for MIME types I can't even view!), maybe introducing a
>        mechanism for reactive content negotiation at the same time.
> 
> I think Larry Masinter's hash-based approach still seems like the
> right one here.
Agree.
> You write: [Koen Holtman]
>     Note that the four Accept headers above could be combined into a
>     single Accept header:
>     
>       Accept: */* image/gif image/x-xbitmap image/jpeg .
> 
> I suggest that the HTTP 1.1 spec encourage this, changing the phrase
> 
> 	 The field may be folded onto several lines
> 
> to
> 
> 	 The field SHOULD be folded onto several lines
> 
> if that hasn't been done already.
Agree.

Andrew. (Endre Balint Nagy) <bne@bne.ind.eunet.hu>

Received on Tuesday, 31 October 1995 18:35:45 UTC