Re: Updating Entity Headers with 304s

On 2007/02/11, at 8:14 AM, Henrik Nordstrom wrote:

> I don't think clarification is needed unless we want to clarify  
> more in
> detail when a 304 should be discarded by the 10.3.5 paragraph above.
>
> We are here in the area of how caches should behave when receiving
> non-compliant responses. In this area cache implementers have three
> choices
>
>   a) Trust the response and blame the non-compliant origin server if
> someone complains about the result.
>
>   b) Discard the response and try again without the conditional as per
> 10.3.5 paragraph above.
>
>   c) Try to make something which makes sense out of the non-compliant
> response.
>
> I think 'b' is what the RFC wants implementers to choose, but I also
> think most will select 'c' for efficiency reasons and not sure  
> that's a
> bad thing..

+1

The reason I wondered whether a clarification was necessary was  
because if an implementer reads 13.5.3, there's not a lot of wiggle  
room for this; it places a MUST on caches, whereas the requirement  
here (i.e. what to do with non-conformant responses) is only implied.

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/