Re: Proposal for #486: Requiring proxies to process warn-date

On Sep 6, 2013, at 5:40 PM, Roy T. Fielding wrote:
> I thought what I heard from the last meeting was that we would
> remove all requirements on warn-date except for those recipients
> who actually process warning header fields.

and I should add...

The 2616 requirements (and motivation) for warn-date are
inherently bogus -- they assume that a Date header field
will be originated by a non-conformant cache, such that a
cached warning value will have a different date than a
non-cached warning value.  I have no idea why that assumption
was made, given that Date is defined as the origin's date of
message creation, is supposed to be cached when a response
is cached, and required to not be originated at each hop.
Even non-conformant caches tend to implement that correctly,
aside from the ones that don't save any header fields.

To reiterate again, NOBODY implements the requirements on
warn-date.  Even if it is implemented as specified, the end
result is the same -- warnings are always ignored by recipients.
This feature should be purged.

....Roy

Received on Saturday, 7 September 2013 00:58:18 UTC