Henry Story wrote:
Now I am wondering if the http mechanism is perhaps all that is needed
for what I want with the unchanging archives. If it is then perhaps this
could be explained in the Feed History RFC. Or are there other
reasons to
add and "expires" tag to the document itself?
On the application level, a feed or entry may expire or age indepedently
of whatever caching mechanisms may be applied at the transport level.
For example, imagine a source that publishes special offers in the form
of Atom entries that expire at a given point in time. Now suppose that
those entries are being distributed via XMPP and HTTP. It is helpful to
have a transport independent expiration/max-age mechanism whose
semantics operate on the application layer rather than the transport layer.
- James
