WICG / WICG/webpackage

Demote `validity-url` to optional

Open
#585 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Go
Stars
1.3k
Forks
125
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

validity-url has many good aspects as mentioned in the spec and as we do know, but it is usually hard to manage them in a very disciplined manner at scale. Ultimately there's one validity-url per SXG, and even if not we still need a kind of solid system to handle validity-urls to take real advantages of them. After all what we see today are publishers having only one validity-url which returns an empty CBOR map:

amppackager:
https://github.com/ampproject/amppackager/blob/bf061bede4b0280654c25b19fc3cc34e25d13cf0/packager/validitymap/validitymap.go#L31

reddit:

$ curl -s 'https://amp.reddit.com/amppkg/validity' | hexdump -C
00000000  a0                                                |.|
00000001

Even after SXGs infiltrated there might be a non-trivial amount of publishers doing like this. This would simply be a burden to publishers and especially to browsers as they make one extra fetch which essentially does nothing.

It'd be awesome if there's a way to explicitly and officially tell "we don't serve any validity for this SXG" to avoid these extra work.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reviewing the validity-url discussion in the web packaging specification and the referenced amppackager implementation at packager/validitymap/validitymap.go. Determine how an SXG can explicitly indicate that it has no validity data, then update the specification so validity-url is optional and the no-validity behavior is defined.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
go
Domain
networking
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.