On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 5:30 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 4:24 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards@wikimedia.org
wrote:
Asher, I understand your hesitation about using HTTP header fields, but there are a couple problems I'm seeing with using query string
parameters.
Perhaps you or others have some ideas how to get around these:
- We should keep user-facing URLs canonical as much as possible
(primarily
for link sharing) ** If we keep user-facing URLs canonical, we could potentially add query string params via javascript, but that would only work on devices that support javascript/have javascript enabled (this might not be a huge deal as we are planning changes such that users that do not support jQuery
will
get a simplified version of the stable site)
- How could this work for the first pageview request (eg a user clicking a
link from Google or even just browsing to http://en.wikipedia.org)?
I think mainly we need the tracking on the API requests... that's all JavaScript-initiated, and all hidden from the user. The main problem with adding parameters would be for caching .... but none of the API hits are currently cacheable so that's not an immediate issue perhaps.
We also need to be able to differentiate between alpha/beta/stable versions of the mobile site, without having to parse the cookie header (I believe as a result of performance constraints around this? I think the analytics team had looked into this previously).