On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Patrick McManus <mcma...@ducksong.com> wrote:
> content format negotiation is what accept is meant to do.

I'm aware, but I think format negotiation on the HTTP layer is a
misfeature that we shouldn't keep treating as if it was a good feature
(for reasons given in https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Why_not_conneg ; I
used to believe in Accept a decade ago, but back then I believed in
XML, too).

On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Patrick McManus <mcma...@ducksong.com> wrote:
> accelerators like cloudflare and mod_pagespeed/mod_proxy exist to do this
> kind of general thing as reverse proxies for specific origins.. they can
> cache the transcoding locally.

I can see how *in theory* it seems attractive to cater to the idea of
the origin server serving bloated files and a drop-in reverse-proxy
magically doing things right thanks to HTTP headers. But (in no
specific order):
 * The process for minting MIME types for fonts is so broken that it's
not worth bothering.
 * The idea only works if other WOFF2-supporting browsers consistently
sent the MIME type (that's too hard to mint) in the Accept header,
too.
 * It would seem more worthwhile to think this is a real use case if
there was ample evidence of optimizer software existing from TrueType
to WOFF1. Is there such evidence?
 * If you really want to do this optimization and get to rewrite
responses with the origin server's permission, why not rewrite the CSS
to list various formats such that they get generated URLs (appended
query strings) and then make the font converter look at the query
string? (That is, if Cloudflare/mod_pagespeed truly want to do this,
the lack of Accept is not stopping them.)

> Obviously that's a lot harder for forward proxies to do. Reverse proxies are 
> often
> the termination of https:// as well - so this transformation remains relevant 
> in the
> https world we want.

Yeah, considering the https world we want, we should treat forward
proxies as adversaries and not something to cater to.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivo...@hsivonen.fi
https://hsivonen.fi/
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