[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 145380] Add Content-DPR header support

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=145380

--- Comment #16 from Alexey Proskuryakov <ap at webkit.org> ---
> You called the proposal "silly" twice in the same sentence -- is that really necessary? 

Thank you for educating me about manners, but you misread the comment. What is silly is the idea that one should add features to browsing engines that enable changing layout via HTTP header fields, not the specific proposal for how to do that.

> Modifying response bodies has a server-side performance hit, and also introduces bugs.

You don't have to modify HTML on the fly, it can be simply written to support multiple image resolutions (like authors already do it today).

We had nearly exactly identical ideas implemented before, and the results were not pretty. The implementations continue to pollute the web platform long after they became unnecessary.

Perhaps the closest historic analogy is text re-encoding, where a dumb browser could only support one charset, and then the server - or even a proxy - would re-encode text/* responses, also changing Content-Type to include the updated charset (updating the charset inside HTML would have had a performance hit, and would have introduced bugs). The right short-term answer was of course to have browsers support multiple encodings, and it was implemented nearly immediately - but the consequences of an HTTP level solution still complicate our lives through convoluted rules for charset selection in text/* vs. application/* content.

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