Re: Etag-on-write, 4rd attempt (== IETF draft 03), was: I-D ACTION:draft-reschke-http-etag-on-write-03.txt

mån 2006-11-06 klockan 20:35 +0100 skrev Helge Hess:

> However, if this is insane, don't we need to extend if-match to allow  
> for weak etags? That is, remove this sentence in rfc2616 14.24:
>    A server MUST use the strong comparison function (see section 13.3.3)
>    to compare the entity tags in If-Match.

Which in itself is a rather stupid restriction in RFC2616, especially if
considering that "If-Match: *" and "If-Unmodified-Since" is allowed
which both are very weak match conditions.

The fact that weak etags is forbidden in If-Range is quite natural as
range merging is very dependent on octal equivalence, but the reasoning
of the other specified limitations of weak etags is not so easy to
understand and seriously limits the usability of weak etags which
despite their weak property is still stronger than Last-Modified (weak
etags guarantee semantic equivalence, which Last-Modified doesn't).

Regards
Henrik