RE: i37: Vary and non-existant headers

On tis, 2008-07-29 at 14:16 -0500, Brian Smith wrote:

> I did make a mistake when I wrote that because I didn't include anything
> about the request method. But, isn't it true that (request-URI,
> request-method) -> Vary must be a function in order for caches to work?

No.

If there is multiple matching entities then caches is free to send any
unexpired one, preferably the latest...

> Whenever I get a different Vary header for the same (request-URI,
> request-method) combination I automatically mark the cached entities for
> that pair as needing revalidation, since I assume that a changing Vary
> header indicates some kind of server reconfiguration. Am I being too
> conservative here?

I do the same, but it's not what the spec intends. We covered this in
great length some year ago.

> We shouldn't mislead readers to think that they can convert
> "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" to "Accept-Encoding: deflate, gzip" or
> "Accept: text/plain;q=1.0" to "Accept: text/plain;" since those kinds of
> transformations have already been explicitly forbidden.

Indeed.

I see no need to mention normalization here, other than referencing P3
4.2.

Regards
Henrik