Re: Tracking hits without cache-busting

Patrick McManus writes:
 >             Simple Hit-Metering and Usage-Limiting for HTTP
...
 > 
 > it's got certain limitations that don't really solve the problem
 > fully, but it's a good start.. cache vendors don't seem to be picking
 > it up yet in force, but support for it can really only help your
 > server.. it's pretty lightweight.

In general, a server can't force a cache to do anything it doesn't want
to do regarding hit metering - if the cache never talks to the server
again, what choice does the server have?

But a server might only send out documents in the first place to clients 
and proxies that it detects as being compliant somehow.  That would most 
likely be a rather self defeating policy however.

One workaround might be to send out all documents with the following header:

  Cache-Control: must-revalidate, maxage=0

Then compliant clients should always make If-modified-since requests to
the origin server.   I'm using this at hypernews.org, but not for hit
counting - just because any message page might have a new reply.

But IE 5 might have a bug regarding this must-revalidate feature: it
doesn't redisplay a page when you revisit it from your history with Back
and Forward keys until you hit enter in the location field, or something
like that.

-- 
Daniel LaLiberte
liberte@w3.org

Received on Friday, 25 June 1999 08:41:50 UTC