caching ideas

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• Next message: Luigi Rizzo: "Re: caching ideas"
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Is there a proposal to add globally unique id's to HTTP?
There is a noticeable lack of unique object identifiers.  

Large objects are often duplicated on the Web....and UID's 
assigned to largish objects would reduce traffic.

These UID's  could comes through as response-header fields.

"Content-Origin: url | some-other-distinguished-name"
"Content-Identifier: md5-coded-hash | some-other-authenticatable-id"

so when an indexer sees that....it can say 
	"well...i already have that...so i'll store it as an alternate location
of the same thing"

or whatever....

------------------------------------

or maybe even a little dumb authentication protocol:

-client uses a HEAD method

-server X's response contains the header:

"Content-Identifier: purportedly-unique-content-id"

-client already has a copy of this document given to him by Y
-....asks if server X if Y's copy is to be trusted

OR some such nonsense.........

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