Re: [apps-discuss] HTTP header field for "URI lifetime"

On 20 May 2015, at 4:23 pm, Erik Wilde <dret@berkeley.edu> wrote:
> 
> hello.
> 
> we had some discussions at www2015 about a possible HTTP header for exposing a URI's "lifetime". please do not get hung up on any terminology, but the scenarios we discussed included:

Hm. It's come up before, and there's a legitimate distinction between this (which is about the resource) and Expires (which is about a specific representation).

However, I'm having trouble seeing how it would be useful to clients — can you illustrate the use cases a little more fully?

E.g., 

> - a service entering the sunset period and wanting to expose the fact that it is going to stop operating at some point in time.

What will a client do with that information? 

Given that this necessarily requires someone to predict the future and make some level of commitment to that, it may be that the information it conveys is of very limited use — i.e., people won't trust it :)

> - a service doing archiving and wanting to expose that resources will only be kept until a certain time, and then disposed.

This seems somewhat related to Memento; CC:ing Herbert for his comment / information.

Cheers,

> - a service that might want to encourage users to check back regularly so that they might implement some strategy to check back periodically and see if the resource is still available or not.
> 
> we could not think of an exiting HTTP header field for exposing this kind of information. i have two questions:
> 
> - is there such a header field?
> 
> - if not, is that something that people find interesting and possibly useful, or do people think that's not needed or even a bad idea?
> 
> thanks a lot and cheers,
> 
> dret.
> 
> -- 
> erik wilde | mailto:dret@berkeley.edu  -  tel:+1-510-2061079 |
>           | UC Berkeley  -  School of Information (ISchool) |
>           | http://dret.net/netdret http://twitter.com/dret |
> 
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Mark Nottingham   https://www.mnot.net/