At 09:45 10/19/00 -0700, Patrick Greenwell wrote:
On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Daniel Senie wrote:
It might be worth thinking about the problem from the other end. From a web site owner's perspective, caching is a major annoyance. Here are the arguments you may encounter from a web site owner or web developer:
1. It interferes with content in many cases (web site visitors may see cached pages instead of current content). I know cache products claim this doesn't happen, but it has, and often.
2. The website owner loses information on how many visitors are coming to the site.
3. The website owner loses the demographics on where visitors are coming from, and especially the number of unique visitors. (It's not helpful to know that one cache engine visited, if that cache engine equated to 10,000 visits in an hour).
Hmmm... Anyone ever considered addressing this via some sort of log passing protocol or somesuch?
This is something identified by Martin Hamilton in the IETF wrec working group's "Known Problems" document (draft-ietf-wrec-know-prob-02.txt) but which was identified as out of scope for the group. That said, the work being proposed in the content peering community (http://www.content-peering.org/) identifies a need for something similar. As Scott said, there's also RFC2227, though that doesn't appear to have much support.