Re: Proposal: Pragma min-age (Was:Re: A modest proposal)

Jeffrey Mogul (mogul@pa.dec.com)
Fri, 18 Aug 95 19:17:43 MDT


I wrote:
    How about doing things the other way?  Any cache (including
    one inside the user agent) that returns a possibly invalid
    object must mark it with (of course) a new header:
	    Possibly-invalid : <reason-why-string>
    The reason-why-string would be some sort of explanation of what
    is suspect.  For example, "server is down, this is 1 hour old"

Oops.  How small-minded of me.  This can't just be a string, since
that would only be useful if the proxy spoke the same language as
the users.  Which is likely to be true, but it's probably not guaranteed.

So I guess we would need some sort of scheme of coded responses,
allowing the browser to turn them into human language.  It would be
nice to include some parameters, though.

-Jeff