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Having admittedly not descended very deeply into the rules regarding HTTP caching, why should it be harder to cache based on the cross-section of the URL and the Accept-Header and not simply upon the URL?

I am not certain which method I prefer more honestly, and could fall either way. The comment that it was nice in theory but didn't work in practice seems to more point to not following the spec as it was written then a problem with the spec itself.

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I would say it's far more difficult if you want to support the full range of capabilities that the Accept header supports. Accept can support more than a single mime-type, and can also include priorities on each mime-type accepted. If you combine that with multiple clients, I think caching based upon that header would be pretty difficult (or you'd have to make some simplifying assumptions).

Impossible? No, not really.

Worthwhile? My opinion is no. I haven't seen the practical benefits of the content-negotiation approach over the URL approach, but I have seen the practical difficulties, so I'm convinced.

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