Re: Cache-control: max-age, uh, where?

Shel Kaphan (sjk@amazon.com)
Wed, 13 Sep 1995 19:34:51 -0700 

Roy Fielding writes:
 > >In http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/hypermail/1995q3/0611.html
 > >
 > >Roy Fielding says:
 > >
 > >> Just as an informational point, I already included these semantics
 > >> in draft 01 for the "max-age" (now Cache-Control: max-age=NNN) parameter.
 > >
 > >This statement confuses me, as I cannot find 'max-age' anywhere in the
 > >current draft, or in the diffs between the current draft and the
 > >previous draft.
 > >
 > >It sounds like people don't think this is a good idea to add, anyway,
 > >so I'm glad you didn't actually add this. But why did you say you had?
 > 
 > It is 1.1 now, since draft 01 was prior to the BCP split.  And yes,
 > it is still a good idea, since there has not been a substantive
 > argument against it which took into consideration that it is also
 > a request header.
 > 
 >  ....Roy T. Fielding  Department of ICS, University of California, Irvine USA
 >                       Visiting Scholar, MIT/LCS + World-Wide Web Consortium
 >                       (fielding@w3.org)                (fielding@ics.uci.edu)

The argument against it didn't take the request-header usage into
account, because that doesn't overlap with other functionality in a
non-orthogonal way.  My main problem with it is its redundancy with Expires,
(as a response header) with which it appears to have almost identical
semantics, though what happens if they are both present is not
well defined.