Re: Our old friends, weak ETags

"Adrien W. de Croy" wrote:
> 
> a) does anyone actually use them?
>

Yes.

>
> b) do they work?
>

I've never heard that they don't, nor run into any problems using them.

>
> c) do we still need them?
> 

Yes, otherwise I have to cache-expire for all changes to resource state,
without the option to declare certain changes insignificant.  Take a
"weblog entry" resource which includes a # of comments counter, with a
link to a comment thread.  XHR is used to synch the count, eventually.

I only change the Etag if the entry itself is edited.  Since metadata
about the entry may change in the meantime, which isn't significant
enough to warrant a new Etag in my caching scheme, I preface with W/ to
indicate variance from the origin server not requiring cache expiration,
i.e. semantic equivalence.

-Eric

Received on Tuesday, 24 July 2012 06:40:33 UTC