Day 22 of 100DaysOfSpec, 2.6 Fetching Resources

I am reading and taking notes on the HTML specifications for 100 days as part of #The100DayProject. Read the initial intent/backstory. I am a Microsoft employee but all opinions, comments, etc on this site are my own. I do not speak on behalf of my employer, and thus no comments should be taken as representative of Microsoft's official opinion of the spec. Subsections not listed below were read without comment.

Currently reading in 2.6 Fetching Resources.

First of all: this is the second week in a row that I've skipped over the whole weekend. That actually had way more to do with a busy work season than laziness, but since we're in the mode of building habits, this trend underlines two things I know subconciously:

1. If I have work that is not yet finished that can't be done within normal work hours, it is very hard for me to put it down and attend to other important elements of life.
2. It is so much easier to make time for something when you have a specific chunk of time blocked out for it. Using my commute to read the spec has helped me keep consistent on work days.

Now on to today's reading.

2.6 Fetching resources

The protocol that the spec describes is http, likely the most familiar/obvious to most folks.

2.6.2 Processing model

I don't think I've ever seen a 204 No Content response code... (described here as when an absolute URL has a scheme the user agent doesn't support, or has a scheme "that does not define a mechanism to obtain the resource"). Their example is a mailto: link, but modern browsers handle those intelligently and never surface an error code to the user. Of course, not all UAs are browsers.

There's a step in the algorithm about updating cookies, unless the block cookies flag is enabled. I'm tempted to read more about how flags work—to me, as consumer, they are just checkboxes—but that sounds like going deep in the weeds...