Re: Max-uses=NNN [was: Another Cache-control: proposal

On Wed, 13 Mar 1996, Larry Masinter wrote:

> I can't believe this scheme is practical. There are too many ways in
> which your demographics could be unreliable by a factor of 'nnnn'
> depending on how cache implementors interpret
> 	cache-control: MAX-uses=NNNN
> that this seems useless to me.

Well, that argument could be advanced regarding most any solution or
other aspect of the HTTP protocols.  If the servers/clients don't
implement carefully, interoperability will suffer.

I think this is an interesting idea ... the question would be how many
of the real customers Netscape, W3C, etc. are aware of deemanding 
some form of usage and/or demographic information would be satisfied with 
this as a widely available first step? I believe we're still waiting
to hear from Ari.

I note that MAX-uses=2 would cut the net load in half for this
category of references with a pretty small loss of significance.

Dave Morris

Received on Thursday, 14 March 1996 08:41:08 UTC