- From: Jeffrey Mogul <mogul@pa.dec.com>
- Date: Wed, 10 Jan 96 15:03:10 PST
- To: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@avron.ICS.UCI.EDU>
- Cc: http-caching@pa.dec.com
I have no problem with including a set of heuristics in the spec for normal cache behavior, with some maximum criteria as well. However, it should also take into consideration things like user-defined requirements for cached responses (such as the "never check" mode of Netscape). Jeff's draft fails to consider these because the definition of "valid" does not consider what the user and provider want the cache to do. I don't understand this last sentence. It is true that the definition of "valid" in my proposal: valid A cached entity is valid, with respect to a given request at a given time, if it is exactly what the origin server would return in response to that request at that time. says nothing about what the user or provider want. But nowhere do I say that what the user sees must always be valid! In fact, I specifically wrote: - The protocol must allow users, servers, and proxies to choose performance over correctness if they want to (I'll address Koen's concerns over my definition of "correctness" in a separate message, but one can assume that I mean this sentence to still apply if "correctness" were replaced by "validity".) For example, a client could specify the equivalent of "never check" by sending "Cache-control: stale-max=10000000000". And I have no idea how you could have gotten the impression that my proposal "does not consider what the ... provider want[s] the cache to do." Was what I wrote really that unclear? -Jeff
Received on Wednesday, 10 January 1996 23:08:44 UTC