Re: Confusion about Age: accuracy vs. safety

Jeffrey Mogul:
>To wit: the spec
>explicitly allows your caches to ignore the expiration times 

This is only allowed if a Warning is added, I believe.

I have always had doubts about whether cache implementers would want
to implement Jeff's Age calculation algorithm without any changes.  I
tried a number of times to get Jeff to add a clause allowing cache
implementers to implement any other algorithm which would not increase
the chance that a stale response was returned.  I never succeeded.
Thus we end up with a spec requiring implementation of an algorithm
that is obviously sub-optimal, and much move vulnerable to
desynchronized clocks than it needs to be.

But I don't think it is productive to update the 1.1 draft and
resubmit it for proposed standard again.  

It will be interesting to see if certain parts of the draft never get
implemented by cache implementers.  If that is the case, I believe
that the IETF process allows us to cut these parts when going from
proposed to RFC.

> -Jeff

Koen.

Received on Wednesday, 4 September 1996 01:08:19 UTC