Re: 1.2beta24pre0818: Cache-Control: xxx-revalidate

Duane Wessels wrote:

> The proxy-revalidate directive has the same meaning as the must-
> revalidate directive, except that it does not apply to non-shared
...
> responses also need the public cache control directive in order to
> allow them to be cached at all.

You may be right. There seems to be a small conflict in RFC 2068,
section 14.8 and 14.9.4 regarding if Cache-Control: public is required
or not, but when thinking a bit on the semantics then it makes sence to
have it required.

must-revalidate and proxy-revalidate is semantically identical for a
proxy server. They only differ in a user-agent cache.

public
  - cacheable, authorization not required

public, proxy-revalidate
  - cacheable, authorization required by each user

public, must-revalidate
  - cacheable, authorization required on every request

must-revalidate
  - private, validation required on every request

proxy-revalidate
  - does not make sense to have proxy-revalidate alone.

Perhaps the author of 14.8 thought that proxy-revalidate should imply
public as it does not make sense without it, but this is inconsistent
with must-revalidate that may be used on private objects as well as
public ones.

It seems that RFC 2068 section 14.8 is only yet one more part of RFC
2068 that requires some clarification..

Lets ignore this for now and require Cache-Control: public to cache
objects which is the most likely correct interpretation, and the safest.
Ignore my patch.

/Henrik
Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:51 MDT