But it might not worth the trouble adding all this complexity just to implement some debug feature
Well, it obviously is a debug feature. But you probably might want to look at it as a small, discreet marketing feature also. I suppose some IT-oriented people view the page source to see the quality of html code or to find out "how" was the page construted/generated. And don't forget the show-time feature prints not only the processing time, but also the Apache Cocoon mark.
(<!-- Processed by Apache Cocoon 2.2... -->)
That's a common practice used in many frameworks/producs ex Vignette products etc.
FYI, cocoon already outputs a "X-cocoon:" HTTP header that "markets" our presence in every request it handles. So, if we really want to know if cocoon handles that resource look at the HTTP headers, they don't break content length and are much more "REST"-ish.
But this can be shadowed/hidden by a web server. I never investigated why, but our applications running on Cocoon don't have this header. So I guess it's the web server (Apache in this case).
Joerg
