[8261] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: caching dilemma
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kee Hinckley)
Fri May 26 02:02:25 1995
Date: Fri, 26 May 1995 01:45:09 +0500
Errors-To: procmaster@www19.w3.org
Reply-To: nazgul@utopia.com
From: nazgul@utopia.com (Kee Hinckley)
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www10.w3.org>
At 10:20 PM 5/25/95, Shel Kaphan wrote:
>To make the web work more smoothly, it would be nice if browsers would
>handle this situation more gracefully, by, for instance, not displaying
>errors like "Data Missing", but just automatically reloading the page.
Automatic reloading of a page in my history stack seems rather
user-unfriendly. I expect history loading to be fast and not go off over
the net. I guess I could see it as a user-specified option, but...
>document. It is REALLY BAD for browsers to display cached copies of
>expired documents when they are meant to be freshly displayed in
>response to a direct user command, because a URL may be a request to a
There I agree.
>program that is displaying dynamic information related to the user's
>extended "session" with the server. (This is the core of the issue).
>
>I realize these considerations may have no role in the HTTP spec,
>however I feel there are serious problems in this area, which can only
>be resolved by coordinating the behavior of browsers and servers.
>
>Another thing that might help: perhaps there should be a way for
>servers to "force" the URL (the *name*) handled by clients to something oth=
er
>than the requested URL. This would allow, for example, the
>requestor's URL to be used to encode information relating to a query,
>but would then result in a single cache entry in the client.
>
>To explain this a little more, if there were two GET requests, one for
>/cgi-bin/food/hamburgers and one for /cgi-bin/food/french-fries, which
>would result in a single page that ought to be cached as one page,
>then the server ought to be able to say, "you asked for
>/food/french-fries, but the page is called /food/generic-junk-food",
>and to have the browser use that info to uniquely identify a cache
>entry and update it with the newly fetched data. This might not help
>to avoid fetching documents extra times, but it would help on cache
>coherence if the intent was to display a dynamically generated document.
>
>Anyway, just some thoughts. If you have any ideas, pointers or references
>for me, I would really appreciate it.
>
>--Shel Kaphan
> sjk@amazon.com
Kee Hinckley Utopia Inc. - Cyberspace Architects=81 617/721-6100
nazgul@utopia.com http://www.utopia.com/
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
