Name 'baggage' is a metaphor and could be hard for non-native English speakers

[hadleybeeman]

As part of our W3C TAG review for this, we've been talking about the name of the feature. Baggage is definitely a US/UK idiom, and may not be intuitive to anyone who hasn't been focusing on distributed tracing. Might it be useful to use something like Trace ID additional header? (Maybe best to do some user research on this — the important thing is that it's immediately understandable to as many of your users as possible.)

[kalyanaj]

Thanks Hadley for sharing this feedback!

As this feature (Baggage) is a mechanism to propagate application-defined properties in a distributed request, it is not tied with Distributed Tracing functionality. We documented a few use cases at https://github.com/w3c/baggage/blob/main/baggage/README.md. Because of this, something like "Trace ID additional header" may not be a good fit.

The naming predates my membership in this group, but from what I understand, since this is used to carry user defined properties (name/value pairs) across multiple participants in a distributed request, I think the analogy would be if the request travels through multiple places, the baggage is a set of things that travels along with it. (BTW, I see the term being used in many regional airlines across many countries and continents, so if that's the case wanted to check if that will help make it more intuitive).

Thanks once again, and please let us know your feedback and if you feel the above provides more context.

[kalyanaj]

@hadleybeeman , a friendly ping on the above, if you have any feedback on the above clarifications, please let us know.

[kalyanaj]

Closing this as this has been covered as part of the discussion at w3ctag/design-reviews#650.