ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Michael Nelson <michael.nelson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 7:45 PM, James Tait <james.tait@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've had a couple of thoughts about how we might approach this:
>
>  - Pass them as discrete GET parameters.  This has the benefit of being
>    easy to test in a browser, and totally transparent.  It's also less
>    likely to be problematic with caches.  On the down side, it will
>    lead to very large URLs.
>  - Pass them as request headers.  This keeps the URL shorter and more
>    focused and is better aligned with other non-user-query attributes
>    such as GeoIP information and language settings, at the expense of
>    being largely invisible, (more) difficult to test in the browser,
>    and may break caching.

+1 for this second option. If the default behaviour when the headers
were missing was to present all results (is that what you meant by
them not being strict requirements?), then testing in the browser
won't be any more difficult for some queries, and curl is easy enough
to test with the headers for anyone (if we have a page with examples
for testing).

Caching should not be an issue (assuming we set Vary: headers
correctly in the server response [1]).

[1] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec13.html#sec13.6

Thanks James!