Re: Cache behavior in the absence of a Fresh-until: header

Jeffrey Mogul writes:
	...
 > So I would suggest that it is a bad idea to give cache adminstrators
 > too much freedom to choose configuration parameters that affect
 > the ability of the server to control what the user sees.  We should
 > move the flexibility, as much as possible, to the server side of
 > things, because that's where the blame will naturally go.
 > 
 > -Jeff

I agree about that usually being the desirable place for blame to go,
(assuming it has to go somewhere) However, in your scheme there's
apparently no way for server administrators to either explicitly or
implicitly say "I don't care - do what's best for you", which means
that caches will be dealing with definite, meaningful freshness
information along with indefinite, meaningless freshness information,
and won't be able to tell the difference, and so will not have as much
information as they could on which to make decisions to revalidate or
discard.  It's almost as if there are two orthogonal pieces of
information here: how long a document remains "fresh", and how sure
the source of that document is about that.

--Shel

Received on Thursday, 11 January 1996 01:58:37 UTC