--On May 6, 2005 4:28:44 PM -0700 Paul Hoffman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > -1. Having two mechanisms in two different layers is a recipe for disaster. > If HTTP headers are good enough for everything else on the web, they're good > enough for Atom.
That would be a problem. But this is one mechanism with two ways to specify it. One is out-of-band in a server-specific way, the other is in the document in a standard way. Either way, it is HTTP rules for caching at all intermediate caches and at the client. Architecturally, this is exactly the same as HTTP-EQUIV meta tags for HTTP headers, and very similar to the ROBOTS meta tag for /robots.txt. In both cases, they provide a way for the document author to specify something without having permissions on the server software config. Further, these should be implemented exactly like HTTP-EQUIV, where the server software reads them and sets the header. The HTTP-EQUIV meta tag is proof "put it in the header" is not good enough for everything else. If that wasn't needed, it would be deprecated by now. There is a problem here, though. We need to specify the priority of the in-document specs vs. the HTTP header specs. I propose following the HTTP standard, in saying that the HTTP headers trump anything in the body. I'll even assume that following the HTTP spec is non-controversial, and go update the PACE. wunder -- Walter Underwood Principal Architect, Verity
