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The Deprecation HTTP Header Field (greenbytes.de)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

I don't really get the purpose of a header like this, who is supposed to check it? It's not like developers casually check the headers returned by an API every week.

Write them a mail if you see deprecated functions being used by a certain API key, probably much more likely to reach somebody that way.

Also, TIL that the IETF deprecated the X- prefix more than 10 years ago. Seems like that one didn't pan out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

You can simply log this response. Then developers know to replace that call in the next version. If you have unit tests that look for this then you can be sure that your next version is not using any deprecated API calls.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

We don't have many unit tests that test against live APIs, most use mock APIs for testing.

The only use for this header would be if somebody sees it during development, at which point it would already be in the documentation or if you explicitly add a feature to look if the header is present. Which I don't see happening any time soon since we get mailed about deprecations as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It makes sense to include so it's obvious in the readable HTTP request response. We use readable URLs and header names for the same purpose: So it is inspectable and understandable from that text format. You may leave deprecation information out, but then you're missing part of the resource description that you're addressing with the URL/URI.

Given a defined header it also allows you to add tooling and automation. There's no need for manual reading.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Also, TIL that the IETF deprecated the X- prefix more than 10 years ago. Seems like that one didn’t pan out.

Can you elaborate on that? The X- prefix is supposedly only a recommendation, and intended to be used in non-standard, custom, ah-hoc request headers to avoid naming conflicts.

Taken from https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6648

In short, although in theory the "X-" convention was a good way to avoid collisions (and attendant interoperability problems) between standardized parameters and unstandardized parameters, in practice the benefits have been outweighed by the costs associated with the leakage of unstandardized parameters into the standards space.

I still work on software that extendively uses X- headers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

The RFC you linked recommends that no new X- prefixed headers should be used.

The paragraph you quoted does not say you should use the X- prefix, only comments on how it was used.

See section 3 for the creation of new parameters: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6648#section-3

I still work on software that extendively uses X- headers.

I wouldn't worry too much about it. The reason they give is mostly that it is annoying if a X- header suddenly becomes standardized and you end up having to support X-Something and Something. Most likely a non-issue with real custom headers.