Re: "Expires:" vs. "Cache-control: max-age"

Jeffrey Mogul writes:
 >    Actually, 
 >    "fresh-life" reminds me rather too much of "life-style".
 > 
 > I was trying to save a few bytes over "fresh-until", but without
 > much success.  Perhaps simply "Cache-control: until=NNN" works?
 > 
 > -Jeff

I hesitate to wander into this at all, but ...  if we want the
semantics to be clear to humans, then "until" isn't really so good,
because a native English speaker would not say "until n seconds" --
with "until", you use a word or phrase indicating an actual moment in
time.

If you want to use a relative amount of time, you'd say something like
"good for n seconds", or "valid for n seconds".  So how about
good-for=NNN, or valid-for=NNN, or stale-after=NNN? "Good-for" is a
little problematic since it sounds like maybe the value should be a
"purpose", not a number of seconds. "Valid-for" may also be a
little problematic since it sounds like it might be related to
"validator", but it isn't.

But really, max-age=N doesn't bother me as long as it is clear what
it is supposed to do.

--Shel

Received on Tuesday, 20 February 1996 03:08:37 UTC