Re: Transient content negotiation
Koen Holtman (koen@win.tue.nl)
Fri, 20 Jun 1997 21:31:40 +0200 (MET DST)
Graham Klyne:
>
[...]
>This suggests to me that it might be desirable to tag negotiable features
>as 'transient' as a warning to intermediate systems to avoid caching these
>(negotiable feature) values in an attempt to 'optimize' future
>negotiations.
Here is how caching of negotiation metadata is handled in HTTP
transparent content negotiation:
- information about the feature set of the browser, if it is sent
over the wire at all, is never cached (at least not under HTTP/1.1,
a future protocol extension may provide sticky header or
dictionary mechanisms which could cache such information for a
short while).
- information about the (features of the) content available at the
server end can be cached, and the whole package (the complete
variant list) can be assigned a caching lifetime according to the
normal HTTP/1.1 max-age model. Conditional GETs can refresh the
package if it is becomes stale.
So there is no cache control at the level of individual features. I
don't know whether such fine-grained caching would be useful in fax
applications.
>GK.
Koen.