Retry-after HTTP response header - does it affect anything?

Question

If I want to politely refuse service on a web site due to temporary overload, the HTTP response 503 Service Unavailable seems appropriate. The spec mentions sending a Retry-

Answer 1

I see this as a chicken-and-egg problem: No browsers currently implement Retry-after since no websites bother to. In my opinion, go ahead and send it as a service to the users. If their choice of web browser doesn't implement it, then that is their browser just not giving them useful information. You did!

When looking to implement standards which have multiple, competing implementations, I always try to adhere to the standards and not pay attention to the different implementations (unless I am specifically trying to emulate an implementation, such as cURLing but disguising my headers to look like a web browser). Otherwise, we end up with defacto standards, which if you remember the IE-dominence days you don't want!