- From: Russell Steven Shawn O'Connor <roconnor@undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 19:03:34 -0400 (EDT)
- To: www-talk@w3.org
On Tue, 29 Jun 1999, Dan Connolly wrote:
> But it's perfectly reasonable to publish a resource that
> is "the current score of the NBA playoff game" that would
> change quite rapidly, provided you label it with the
> relevant metadata (expires, time-to-live, whatever).
> If I visited such a resource, then followed a link, then
> came back, I'd prefer to see the *old* score, plus
> a "dead fish" or whatever that tells me I'm looking at
> stale info.
*whew* It's not clear to me what is the right thing to do in this
situation. In the example you give, I think ideally there'd be an applet
(or something) that keeps you advised of the current score. But in the
more general case I can see it sometimes being irritating to have what you
are trying to read suddenly change on you, and sometimes irritating to
have what you are reading being out of date.
Your dead fish is one approach. Another might be to get the most recent
copy, but still have an accessible cache of what the page was like when
you visited before.
One think I try to do is not get my mind set on the way browsers currently
navigate. This is particularly important because they way the navigate right
now is terrible. I don't want a back stack. I want an tree, like what I
see in trn.
> The problem is: so few pages declare their TTL that caches
> have to assumes something like 24hours, and so providers
> of dynamic services have to commit all sorts of hackery
> to work around those caches. Sigh.
Of course declaring TTL is hard to impossible to do. For example, I don't
know when I'll next update my web page. Whenever I feel like it. Of
course it's not that important if my page is a little stale in the cache,
but it could be important.
--
Russell O'Connor roconnor@uwaterloo.ca
<URL:http://www.undergrad.math.uwaterloo.ca/%7Eroconnor/>
``And truth irreversibly destroys the meaning of its own message''
-- Anindita Dutta, ``The Paradox of Truth, the Truth of Entropy''
Received on Tuesday, 29 June 1999 19:03:38 UTC