Re: 13.1.2 Warnings

Daniel DuBois:
>
>>Perhaps we have different ideas of what "transparency" means, but it seems to
>>me that receiving an entity with an erroneous header is not transparent. It
>
>OK, you are right.  I was thinking about transparancy of the entity body.
>But in the HTTP spec, semantic transparency is defined as 'exactly the same
>response (except for hop-by-hop headers)'.  Warning, although added in a
>middle hop, I dont believe can be considered a hop-by-hop header.

I don't think there is a wording problem here: the spec talks about
_weakening_ the transparency.  I read 

 Warnings are always cachable, because they never weaken the transparency
 of a response.

to mean `.., because they never cause a stale response to be
interpreted as fresh'.

Aside: though I don't think that the sentence is _wrong_, I do think
it is potentially confusing.  I have argued repeatedly in the past
that the term `semantic transparency' is useless for describing HTTP,
and that it should therefore not be used in the draft.  Like
`idempotence', the term `semantic transparency' will haunt us for
years to come.

>Daniel DuBois

Koen.

Received on Friday, 18 October 1996 03:26:43 UTC