Re: cache-busting document

On Sat, 7 Jun 1997, Ben Laurie wrote:

> Larry Masinter wrote:
> > Do sites with planned expiration set expires dates?
> 
> Good question - this implies a level of planning I expect is largely absent
> from the Web.

A number of groups who have traditionally published expiring documents, or
have documents with very firm review cycles managed by their document
managment systems already have the planning done to easily create
meaningful expiration dates. What is sometimes missing is the 'API' 
which allows them as informed content providers to easily propigate this
meta data to the web. 

Also missing is the backup justification to encourage that this be done.

> Now this is a stunningly sensible suggestion. Changing all the references
> would be onerous, though - unless it was done by server-side parsing (yech).

If you think is terms of HTML static web content, that could be a problem,
but it isn't too far fetched to think of content authoring / document
management systems which would do the step automatically when generating
the web form of the content.  A lot like assemblers and compilers
generating machine language addresses.

This suggestion is very sensible because it allows for very easy
and smooth migration of revised content to the web.  A lot like some
computer file systems where every change to a file is written to a
new disk block which changes the meta data listing where the disk
blocks are for the file, etc.  A single final action commits all the
other changes. Nothing out of sync because an old image is replaced
before the content matches, etc.

Dave Morris

Received on Sunday, 8 June 1997 13:39:46 UTC