One last question: what milestones are you planning to run this experiment 
on?

On Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 7:02:51 PM UTC+2 Patrick Meenan wrote:

On Tue, Oct 10, 2023 at 3:18 AM Yoav Weiss <yoavwe...@chromium.org> wrote:


Can you briefly describe what the header parts are good for, and how would 
developers use them?


There are 2 parts to the header which is formatted as a structured-field 
dictionary (comma-separated entries with each entry being key=value.

The 2 keys are:
u (urgency <https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9218#name-urgency>) = 
numeric from 0 to 7 with 0 being the highest priority and 7 being the 
lowest (and 3 being the default).
i (incremental 
<https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9218#name-incremental>) = boolean 
to specify if the response should be interleaved with other responses of 
the same priority (defaults to disabled).

e.g. "priority: u=1, i" would indicate a high priority request that allows 
for interleaving.

I'm not expecting a lot of direct web developer use of it. It's more for 
the HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 servers to use to prioritize multiplexed responses 
and to align with Firefox and Safari for any servers that prefer to just 
use the headers for prioritization and not do the frame-level priorities 

So this will be sent in both H2 and H3?
 

(which Chrome is the only browser to use for HTTP/3).


Do you know why other browsers don't implement the frame version?
 


In theory, a web developer could prioritize the processing of 
higher-priority requests differently than low-priority requests but most 
cases where that makes sense would probably be relying on other headers 
like "Sec-Purpose: prefetch" if they want to segregate their infrastructure 
and de-prioritize background fetches.
 

 


*Gecko*: Shipped/Shipping
*WebKit*: Shipped/Shipping


Any links that show this is shipping?
I see some evidence that this is available behind a flag in Safari, but 
nothing beyond that.


Safari removed the explicit flag in 16.4 for HTTP/3 and enabled it for a 
subset of users but I don't see mention of it in the release notes in 16.4 
or later so the status hasn't been communicated externally. When HTTP/3 
does get used in Safari, the Priority header is always enabled. I have a 
test page here (https://headers.patrickmeenan.com/) that has HTTP/3 enabled 
and will echo the protocol and headers that were received by the server. If 
you can get Safari to use HTTP/3 (at a minimum you have to turn off private 
relay) then it will show the Priority header.

Firefox pretty reliably switches to HTTP/3 on the test page after a few 
reloads and will show the header.

The test page also tests what the browser does if fetch() is called with a 
priority header that is application-set.  Safari (and the Chrome 
implementation) defer to the application-set value and do not add the 
protocol-specific value in that case. Firefox sends 2 Priority headers.


Would be great to get an official word from them on what they are shipping 
and when. Maybe file (non-blocking) positions on this? 

 

 


Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests 
<https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/testing/web_platform_tests.md>
?No

HTTP headers (and protocols) are not testable in Web Platform Tests.


I don't think that's correct. You could create custom handlers 
<https://web-platform-tests.org/tools/wptserve/docs/handlers.html#python-handlers>
 that 
would reflect the request's priority header in the response.


Sorry, headers themselves are testable but this header specifically 
requires a HTTP/3 server for cross-browser testing (or at least a HTTP/2 
server for Chrome testing) AFAIK, the server in wpt can't test HTTP/3. Even 
if it could, the actual priority values themselves aren't standardized and 
wouldn't be testable in wpt (other than their presence).

If the header is added to HTTP/1.1 requests (or if at least HTTP/2 is 
supported by the WPT server) then we could use the priority header to test 
fetchpriority and make sure high/low fetchpriority is reflected as a 
relative difference in the priority at the network level but that's not 
explicitly testing this header (and not currently possible).
 

  



As far as TAG review, as Yoav mentioned, this is an IETF spec and Chrome is 
actually catching up to support that has already shipped in other browsers. 
That said, it might not be a bad idea to get it on the TAG's radar to get 
some consistency in the fetch() behavior since "Priority" isn't currently a 
reserved header and the browsers differ in how they behave if the header is 
explicitly set.  Not sure if that's more appropriate for TAG or just for an 
issue on the fetch spec repository. 

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