Re: Cache control in trailers?

Hi Mark,

On Wed, Feb 03, 2021 at 11:40:41AM +1100, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> A more limited approach would be to focus just on the cache's behaviour --
> e.g., to allow Cache-Control: no-cache in trailers,[2] updating the semantics
> of the response to make sure that it's revalidated before it's reused.
> 
> What do folks think - would this be useful? Obviously it would need to be
> implemented in browsers and other caches.

I think there could be some value in this, but please let's *not* reuse
the same trailer name then. In my experience the vast majority of header
producers have no idea what they do, and they just assemble a collection
of header values+names gathered from Stackoverflow and Wikipedia as a way
to "increase the likelihood this will work". Starting to send the signal
that such an important header field could be placed in either the header
or the trailer part will quickly result in anything important being sent
in both parts "just in case", and I guess none of us wants to have to
deal with that.

But maybe working on the notion of a final status, or maybe an abort
cause could prove useful over the long term. These could be used to
indicate a change of decision regarding caching, deliver a user-friendly
excuse message (e.g. "communication error with origin server"), timing
information (e.g. "processing time 10 ms, transfer time 143 ms"), a
content checksum etc.

Willy

Received on Wednesday, 3 February 2021 04:25:43 UTC