Re: resource immutability

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 10:25:18PM -0800, Mark Nottingham wrote:
> [ Gerald Oskoboiny: ]
> > It might just be a matter of educating people what is already possible.
> 
> I was thinking of something that would allow lower-cost implementations;
> right now, if a tool wants to take advantage of such information, it needs
> to implement a complete, HTTP-compliant cache. An immutable flag would
> lower the bar considerably; it says "yes, just store a local copy and use
> it from now on."

Yes, that's true.

I would hope that popular languages like Perl and Python would
have libraries to do this kind of thing, but I haven't really
checked. Then all we'd need to do is convince people to use
libraries instead of writing from scratch.

> > The other day the RSS world discovered ETags and it seems to have
> > spread around various implementations quite quickly, after some
> > people wrote it up clearly and others became motivated enough by
> > the bandwidth savings to spend time implementing it.
> 
> Saw that; very encouraging.

It seems like expiry times could be handled in a similar way: not
necessarily full HTTP/1.1 implementations, just the bare minimum
needed to track and honor expiry info.

-- 
Gerald Oskoboiny     http://www.w3.org/People/Gerald/
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)    http://www.w3.org/
tel:+1-613-261-6630             mailto:gerald@w3.org

Received on Monday, 4 November 2002 23:09:53 UTC