RE: New document on "Simple hit-metering for HTTP"

>You don't understand my argument: the customers above are the ones who
>pay for each the hit.  They are not the ones who do the cache busting:
>it is the web advertising sites they pay who do the cache busting.
>These advertising sites are sophisticated enough to pick and deploy
>the mechanism which gets them the highest hit counts, which is cache
>busting until something better comes along.

I have to agree with Paul here....

Professionals (IE: Pathfinder) no longer report things like "10K hits
per day" to clients who pay well.  They say "we have a large
international audience" or "we get 40% of our hits from browsers which
support Java".

Information such as "User Agent" and the clients ip address (for
demographics) are crucial to the log reporting in the sites I have
worked on (albeit only 6 sites).  What companies want to do is leverage
demographic information and statistics by proving that their content is
viewed for in a given region/language and OS.  (somebody who is selling
Macintosh software won't want to advertise on a site whose viewers all
use Windows........etc.)

Perhaps the hit-metering process should allow a proxy to forward some
sort of a headers-only-summary during a period of relative inactivity. 
The server should not care how long it has been since the proxy has last
sent its summary.   The "Expires" header can then still be used to
accurately reflect the duration of the validity of the document.



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Received on Thursday, 8 August 1996 05:40:30 UTC