- From: Koen Holtman <koen@win.tue.nl>
- Date: Thu, 3 Oct 1996 19:18:22 +0200 (MET DST)
- To: Foteos Macrides <MACRIDES@sci.wfbr.edu>
- Cc: koen@win.tue.nl, http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
Foteos Macrides: > [...] > This perhaps still confuses two different things that current >UAs do not distinguish clearly when handling FORMs, but UAs of the >future should. [...] >The first refers to a "cache", in the conventional sense, of >the *reply* entity (body) from the previous submission, whereas >the second refers to the set of information needed to repeat >the submission for a new reply. I understand the distinction, but this issue is orthogonal to HTTP protocol extensions as far as I can see, so it should not be discussed on this list. [....] [Koen:] >>Thus, introducing a `Redo-Safe: yes' header would make more sense >>than `Idempotent: yes'. > > The concept of "safe" is subject to a variety of interpetations, >in contrast to "idempotent", which can be defined precisely. The 1.1 spec defines both "safe" and "idempotent" precisely. With the 1.1 definitions, the header name we want is "Redo-Safe", not "Idempotent". The "idempotent" definition in the 1.1 spec talks about _all_ side effects, not just unsafe side effects. This makes "idempotent" a pretty useless term for discussing real-life http applications. > Fote Koen.
Received on Thursday, 3 October 1996 10:25:13 UTC