Subject: RE: [Simple] -05 MESSAGE and Expires header

From: Adam Roach <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 18:19:38 -0500

Please don't use HTML or Rich Text in your mail to the list.
It makes your messages difficult to reply to.

Comments below.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bobby Sardana [mailto:[email-masked]]
 
> ...as an implementor, I would not have to pick the spec
> to figure out what specific meaning does "Expire" have
> and in what method context. If there are self-descriptive
> headers, then their use would be of help -- both from an
> implementation & understanding purposes.

I'm not sure that's possible.

What does "Expire" *currently* mean? It might mean the duration
of validity for an invitation. It might mean the duration of
softstate for a registration or a subscription. In terms of
handling, these are radically different things.

So, to say that it could also be a user-interface indication
for staleness of IMs that may or may not also be used in making
store-and-forward decisions doesn't seem to be a stretch. Above
all, I can't formulate a consistent handling that can be assigned
to the existing methods (i.e. published in RFCs) to unify
them.

Or, perhaps I'm just missing something obvious. I would
be interested in hearing you put forth a propasal that
describes a handling for "Expires" that applies uniformly
to all methods.

/a

---

From: Bobby Sardana <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2002 17:06:58 -0700

Comments towards the end.

-----Original Message-----

> ...

The proposal is simple: (not sure from a complete applicability point of
view, but here it is)

a. Expire signifies a unit of time
b. For methods that have the Expire header, the unit of time determines
the method validitity. The only exception here is 0, which can mean
"expired" or "infinite".

I know the above is not a formal proposal but it's the only one I am
thinking.

regards,

Bobby Sardana.
[email-masked]