Original 'accept-hash' post:

Date: Mon, 10 Jul 95 14:01:24 EST
To: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
In-reply-to: Alex Hopmann's message of Mon, 10 Jul 1995 13:45:11 -0700 <199507102045.NAA08852@holonet.net>
Subject: Re: HTTP Session Extension draft 
From: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>

It might improve net efficiency (and possibly allow servers to
precompute information or ignore these headers if they don't care) to
package together those things that are configuration specific (accept,
accept-encoding, accept-charset, accept-language and user-agent:) and
send them by reference, e.g.,

the client sends:

accept-hash: NNNNNNNNNNNNNNN

where NNNNNNNNNNNNNN is the MD5 of the omitted headers; the server
sends back an error return if it actually needs the fields.

This would be useful independent of whether the connection remains
open: even if the connection closes, the information might affect a
cache choice; even if the connection remains open, a proxy might want
to send different header information when proxying for different
clients. 

(Clearly this would be in 1.1; if HTTP were recast as ILU or CORBA, it
would be done as a client object that the server could interrogate.)

Received on Friday, 3 November 1995 16:52:23 UTC