New HTTP standards for caching on the modern web
I appreciate that the Cache-Status: header they describe uses RFC 8941 structured fields and thus &quot;;&quot; to separate items within each cache and &quot;,&quot; between caches. It&#x27;s like someone put effort into making it easy to parse.<p>Rant time: I just finished writing a state machine parser for &quot;WWW-Authenticate:&quot; and &quot;Proxy-Authenticate:&quot;. Those headers use comma both to separate challenges and to separate parameters within a challenge, which just seems mean-spirited. Other things about HTTP authentication that seem mean, dumb, annoying, or all of the above: both the RFC 2069 example response and the RFC 7616 SHA-512-256 example response are calculated incorrectly; RFC 7616&#x27;s userhash field seems to require the server to do O(users_in_database) hashes to know what user to operate on; RFC 7235&#x27;s challenge grammar describes a token68 syntax that really only is used for the credentials in basic, never a challenge; RFC 7616 drops backwards compatibility for RFC 2069 even though I bought a product this year that still uses RFC 2069-style calculations; and it&#x27;s based on old standards that followed &quot;be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others&quot; so RFC 7230 section 7 has separate grammars for what lists you must send and what lists you must accept, which further complicates parsing the nested lists.