- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Tue, 20 Feb 96 15:17:36 PST
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Cc: http-caching@pa.dec.com
Why don't you just define the default on other methods to be a
cache flush, and then allow
Cache-control: idempotent
on the request to identify a method that doesn't need a flush.
Note, however, that you'll still need to tell the cache what it
should use as the cache key, and that is not a trivial problem.
This might be a useful thing to include (leaving aside the question
of whether "idempotent" has the right meaning).
But may not be sufficient. Consider the case of a new (future)
method that (like MOVE) affects a resource that is not the
Request-URI and (unlike MOVE) is also not in the URI: header.
An HTTP/1.1 cache would not know that this other resource also
has to be flushed from the cache.
There are several ways to approach this:
(1) Jeff, you ignorant fool, there is no way that this
will ever happen.
(2) Maybe someone will propose this kind of method in
the future, but we'll have to reject that proposal
because the HTTP/1.1 caches will not support it (as
well as the HTTP/1.0 caches)
(3) We could (in HTTP/1.1) define a Cache-control directive
to make this work. For example,
Cache-control: flush-URI="URI"
or something like that.
-Jeff
Received on Tuesday, 20 February 1996 23:31:41 UTC