Link: http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/ticket/37
Origin: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/ietf-http-wg/2004JanMar/0021.html
Component: p6-cache
When an origin server selects the response by looking at a request header, and the header does not exist, is it correct for the server to add the name of that header to Vary?
For example, suppose a server's logic is like this pseudo-code:
reponse_headers (Vary) = "Accept-Language" IF request_headers (Accept-Language) contains "ja" THEN serve the japanese page ELSE serve the english page ENDIF
What is the correct HTTP response when the request doesn't have an Accept-Language header?
I would guess that the correct response is to "include Vary: Accept-Language", but that begs the next question:
How should a cache treat missing requests headers which are mentioned in Vary, when deciding if a stored entity matches a request?
I would imagine that in case a, the entity matches, and in cases b and c, the entity doesn't match and must be revalidated.
But the language of RFC 2616 is a unclear:
When the cache receives a subsequent request whose Request-URI specifies one or more cache entries including a Vary header field, the cache MUST NOT use such a cache entry to construct a response to the new request unless all of the selecting request-headers present in the new request match the corresponding stored request-headers in the original request.
Can the selecting request-headers "match" if they are absent? What about case a?
The selecting request-headers from two requests are defined to match if and only if the selecting request-headers in the first request can be transformed to the selecting request-headers in the second request by adding or removing linear white space (LWS) at places where this is allowed by the corresponding BNF, and/or combining multiple message-header fields with the same field name following the rules about message headers in section 4.2.
Is this supposed to mean that an absent header is equivalent to an empty header, or that an absent header is semantically a distinct value from an empty header, or that an absent header is not considered at all in the decision, or that an absent header cannot be matched even with an absent header in the original request for the cached entity?
Does this mean that server code which inspects a header value, and finds the header missing, should look like this instead?
IF exists request_headers (Accept-Language) THEN reponse_headers (Vary) = "Accept-Language" ELSE response_headers (Vary) = "*" ENDIF IF request_headers (Accept-Language) contains "ja" THEN serve the japanese page ELSE serve the english page ENDIF
The conservative thing to do is to disable cacheing when an examined request-header is absent, but that seems excessively pessimistic.
Proposal: remove "present" (from < http://www.w3.org/mid/ACDEBA0B-77DC-4888-8E57-24C39AAF07C9@gbiv.com >)