- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Apr 96 16:32:27 MDT
- To: Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com>
- Cc: "'http-caching@pa.dec.com'" <http-caching@pa.dec.com>
Henry Sanders made an interesting suggestion to me -- what if we made
max-age=0 always mandatory (same as proposed "must-validate", but told
people to use max-age=1 when it was (barely) acceptable for end-user
caches to violate it.
Not revalidating when max-age is 0 would require a dialog box each time
for the user to approve; not validating for max-age > 0 could be done
with a preference setting.
This way, a user-agent that just wanted to strictly obey the
origin-server's max-age request could just ignore this whole issue.
I think we (except probably for Roy) are basically nit-picking about
an encoding scheme. Henry's proposal seems to be that
max-age=NNNN
(1) what I meant by "must-revalidate" if NNNN == 0
(2) what we've already defined for max-age=NNNN for NNNN > 0
I'm not sure if this is any easier (or harder) to implement than
my proposal. It won't make the spec a lot shorter (since the
two different semantics will still have to be explained). It makes
the list of cache-control directives one entry shorter. It makes
it slightly more likely that someone will be confused about the
meaning of max-age (since it has this somewhat odd shift).
-Jeff
Received on Wednesday, 10 April 1996 23:59:26 UTC