Re: Entity Tags

David W. Morris (dwm@shell.portal.com)
Mon, 19 Aug 1996 22:25:27 -0700 (PDT)


On Mon, 19 Aug 1996, Jeffrey Mogul wrote:

> For example, imagine a stock-quote page where the quoted price of,
> say, EDS goes from "52 7/8" to "51 1/8".  That doesn't change the
> length of the file at all.  OK, this is bad example; nobody in their
> right heads would cache stock-quote values, but my point is that
> relying on file-length is a really bad idea.

Just to put a real stake in the ground, I've received two *.dll-s from
a vendor. The second includes fixes/changes from the first, but the
length is identical (5xx120 bytes, I don't remember the xx). In this
case, the only improbability is generation of two 500K dlls within 1
second ;-:)

Bottom line, you can't assume the length won't change.

Dave