Re: ETags and concurrency control

Werner Baumann wrote:
> Things are quite different, when you think of weak etags meaning not 
> byte-by-byte, but semantically equal. But there is the whole mess. These 
> are two completely different and unrelated concepts.
> - insecure (or unreliable): there is a small chance, that the entity 
> changed without changing the etag, and the change may be completely 
> arbitrary.
> - semantically equivalent, though not byte-by-byte equal.
> 
> As long as you try to get this two concepts into one definition of weak 
> etag, it will stay a confusing mess.

Plus, when you serve a "semantically equivalent" weak ETag, you can't
serve a strong ETag at the same time.

This is a silly limitation: supporting weak comparison (whatever it
means) shouldn't prevent strong caching from being possible!

-- Jamie