Re: oh the irony

From: Mark Nottingham (mnot@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Aug 03 1999 - 05:15:08 MDT


> Talking about cache and replication, it would be nice also to have more
> and more server admins doing "the right thing" about Cache-Control
> headers, it would avoid dirty hacks to see if a resource can be cached or
> not...

OK, this is getting even *more* off-topic (sorry!), but I've been working on
a study of web server capabilities for a little while, and it may be of
interest in this regard. It does things from the other end; instead of doing
trace analysis, etc, it breaks down popular servers into types of _content
generators_ that they use, and tests them for protocol compliance.

It's still quite rough, and not the most rigerous study you'll see, but have
a look at:
http://www.mnot.net/papers/capabilities.html
(and I apologise in advance for the PDF - I know the type is really small!)

Where is this leading? I'm starting to put together an (even more embryonic)
I-D that deliniates server-side roles in regard to responsibility for HTTP
compliance. The argument is that people aren't just using static files to
manage content any more, and the protocol will hit a wall if it isn't
accounted for in servers.

Would this be wrec's area, http-wg's, or somewhere else? Any interest out
there?

--
Mark Nottingham
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.mnot.net/



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