Do any major browsers provide technical specifications?

Posted by AmbientEngineer@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 7 comments

I'm working on a backend cache busting strategy and observing bizarre differences between Safari and Chrome. This got me wondering, do any of the major game players provide lower level technical details? I tried searching myself but only found general end-user facing technical help documents

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7 Comments

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dmazzoni@reddit

There are public specs for nearly everything browsers do, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, HTTP, SSL, and so on. If you're talking about caching in particular, I expect you'd find that in HTTP specs. It's not like the specs are written by one group and the browsers just implement it. Major browser vendors are some of the largest contributors to those specs these days. When they discover anything ambiguous or subtle differences in behavior, they suggest changes to the spec and try to reach consensus.

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AmbientEngineer@reddit (OP)

I'm aware of technical specifications that define languages / protocols, etc... I'm familiar with RFC 7324 & 7232 that define caching behavior. Specifications will commonly have grey areas left to the discretion of the developer when creating an implementation. For caching, that usually involves storage mechanisms, eviction policies, and privacy protections. These decisions can impact the performance of the cache, making it difficult to explain unwanted behavior. Hence why it would be useful if, say Apple, briefly described their storage approach for Safari .

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dmazzoni@reddit

Apple would only want to do that if they wanted developers to depend on that behavior...but they might not. They want the flexibility to change their behavior as long as it's still compliant with the spec. Have you determined whether the behavior that you're interested in is in the Safari or the WebKit part of the code? One way to test would be to download and build WebKit from source, or find a prebuilt archive of a recent version of WebKit that has all of the executables. I think the one you want is called "minibrowser" - it's WebKit with a very tiny host application. If the minibrowser behaves the same as Safari, then you can debug it yourself and figure out how it works and maybe why. If it behaves differently, then it means the behavior the code you want is part of Safari. Could you say more about what issue you're hitting? Is Safari keeping your site cached even after you update files on the server, while other browsers are not? What cache busting techniques are you using now?

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AmbientEngineer@reddit (OP)

In essence, for high traffic / large resources, we're appending hashes to the filenames and extending their HTTP cache properties to be cached for several months in an effort to reduce the total number of requests. If a resource is updated, a new hash is appended, and users will subsequently request that resource in their next visit. We're observing 404s requesting the old hash strictly from user agents using Safari. We assume this is due to a low-level property in Safari but can't validate

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Exciting_Session492@reddit

These are likely implementation details and can change any moment. You can use the source code as technical specifications for these types of scenarios.

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lmouelle@reddit

There are specs for HTML and ECMAscript if that's what you mean? Browsers are implementations of those specs Or are you asking not about specs, but technical documentation for each browser specifically?

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