Re: ETags vs Variants, was: Revising RFC2616 - what's happening

Henrik Nordstrom schrieb:
> tor 2006-10-19 klockan 22:56 +0100 skrev Jamie Lokier:
> 
>> While on the subject of Etag and variants, it's never been clear what
>> a Vary header that names a header not in the original request means.
> 
> For me that never was a question. I immediately read Vary as the
> complete list of headers the server looked for while selecting which
> variant to send. But this may be just my reading of the RFC..

It doesn't help that "Vary" is described in two places, Section 13.6 and 
  14.44.

In 13.6 it says:

"When the cache receives a subsequent request whose Request-URI 
specifies one or more cache entries including a Vary header field, the 
cache MUST NOT use such a cache entry to construct a response to the new 
request unless all of the selecting request-headers present in the new 
request match the corresponding stored request-headers in the original 
request." (<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#rfc.section.13.6>)

At least this part IMHO needs to be fixed to say how to treat the case 
where a header doesn't appear in the request.

> What isn't very clear to me was what change in Vary means on a URI.

Sorry?

>> But (a) is that use of Vary allowed
> 
> I think so.
> 
>> (b) is it consistently interpreted that way by caches, and
> 
> Quite likely. I know at least Squid does it this way, and most others I
> have seen caching Vary.
> 
> But many shared proxy caches still don't cache Vary responses at all.

Well, those aren't HTTP/1.1 compliant, so there's nothing we can do 
about those.

>> (c) it would be good for the improved RFC to clarify this.
> 
> Probably. Many get Vary wrong. But the most common error I have seen is
> not sending Vary when it should have been sent and still expecting
> caches to do the right thing.. But I have not seen this dependent on the
> existence of the header in the request or not.

One of the reasons may be broken handling of Vary headers in user 
agents, mainly IE 
(<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;824847>), but 
also Firefox (<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=269303#c30>).

Best regards, Julian

Received on Friday, 20 October 2006 12:28:42 UTC