Re: Etag-on-write, 2nd attempt (== IETF draft 01)

Lisa Dusseault schrieb:
> 
> Actually, I'm proposing to narrow the scope by adding the requirement of 
> working with existing deployed offline-cache clients, which will limit 
> the number of solutions that will meet the overall set of requirements.  
> This doesn't require a new feature.
> 
> Lisa

I'm really not sure what you're talking about. The draft spends a lot of 
time explaining that ETags returned upon PUT do /not/ indicate the state 
of the entity sent by the client, but the state of the entity as stored 
by the server. As servers are allowed to (and indeed do) rewrite 
content, there's no generic way in HTTP to avoid refetching the content, 
if octet-by-octet identity is required (which I don't think is in many 
cases).

That being said, the draft makes a proposal for a very small extension 
which is backwards compatible with HTTP, and which allows clients to 
detect when a server indeed did not rewrite the content.

That's all.

If you don't agree with the base analysis (1st paragraph over here, and 
Section 2 in the draft), please be more specific.

Best regards, Julian