- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
- Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 19:16:57 PDT
- To: koen@win.tue.nl
- Cc: mogul@pa.dec.com, fielding@avron.ics.uci.edu, http-caching@pa.dec.com
I think the only thing left is to come up with an acceptable
terminology.
I don't like "weak validator" and "strong validator" since while there
is "weak validation" and "strong validation" the tokens that are used
to perform this validation are not themselves respectively "weak" and
"strong".
Let me propose two new words:
content-token
octets-token
A content-token is used for 'weak validation'. An octets-token is used
for 'strong validation'. Two entities have the same octets-token only
if they have exactly the same sequence of octets, and can be used for
range retrieval. Two entities have the same content-token only if they
differ in semantically inconsequential ways (as deemed by the origin
server), and can be used interchangably in retrieval of entire
entities.
Last-modified is a content-token that uses date, and so is not opaque.
I used the word 'token' instead of 'validator' or 'identifier' or
'id', since it doesn't, by itself, validate, and 'identifier' is
overloaded, since it only identifies the entity with respect to the
context of a single URL.
Received on Friday, 12 April 1996 02:34:30 UTC