Re: Comments on the HTTP/1.0 draft.

> > Regarding busy server errors, a "Retry-After:" field might be
> > reasonable, but I would prefer to just make it an HTTP-date rather
> > than inventing something new for clients to have to parse.  If we were
> > going to use relative dates, there are plenty of other places (like
> > Expires:) where they make as much sense.  A pointer to an alternative
> > address also seems like a sensible way to handle timeouts.
> 
> Actually, I was going to propose adding an optional delta-seconds
> for Expires as well, but not until HTTP/1.1.

Relative time indications are a requirement if we want `expires' to be
used for automatic refresh of data by the client on dynamic data. The
refresh ratio might be some seconds or minuttes and hence it must be an
relative indication in order to overcome synchronization problems
between server and client. The full date is quite expensive and an
integer might be a lot easier to handle.

-- cheers --

Henrik Frystyk

Received on Wednesday, 30 November 1994 07:25:04 UTC