In reviewing the protocol spec (and the basic protocol spec), there is no mention
of recommended HTTP headers. There are examples in the basic protocol spec that
shows ETag and Last-Modified but not Expires. Maybe there should be a section
in the protocol spec showing "recommended headers" (a SHOULD) for use
with Atom feeds. This would encourage the use of these three headers.
Brett Lindsley, Motorola Labs.
Julian Reschke wrote:
Brett Lindsley wrote:
Andy, I recall bringing up the same issue with respect to portable devices. My angle
was that firing up the transmitter, making a network connection and connecting to
the server is still an expensive operation in time and power (for a portable
device) - even if the server returns nothing . There is no reason to check feeds
that are not being updated, but then, there currently is no way to know this.
I recall there was a proposal on cache control. That seemed like a good direction,
but I don't recall it being discussed. As you indicated, if the feed had some
element that indicated it won't be updated (for example) for another day (e.g.
a "daily news summary"), then the end client would need to only check once
a day.
Brett Lindsley, Motorola Labs
Isn't this what the HTTP "Expires" header is for (<http://greenbytes.de/tech/webdav/rfc2616.html#header.expires>)?
Best regards, Julian
