Re: Caching proxies seem a clear copyright violation Re: Caching proxies seem a clear copyright violation> On 2/6, Glenn Fleishman said:
>
> >..... My guess is that the online
> >services will all use caching proxies, so hits will be reflective of
> >refreshes to our sites, not of actual users.
>
> explaining that .....
>
> >(A caching proxy is a gateway between an internal network -- whether that's
> >Prodigy or a major corp. -- that queries remote hosts for data and then
> >feeds it to the requesting "inside" individual. It also caches a copy of
> >the data for later retrieval based on certain criteria. What those criteria
> >are, I'd like to know.)
>
> This talk of "caching proxies" for web sites really troubles me. I noticed
> in a Prodigy press releases that they plan to cache large numbers of web
> pages around their network to speed up access for their users.
>
> To me, this practice looks a lot like the corporation that make photocopies
> of professional journal articles for its researchers' personal files. The
> company benefits in a couple of ways-- it saves money by not paying for
> extra copies of costly trade journals (Prodigy avoids buying more computer
And even beyond this, caching documents like this will seriously
break alot of CGI scripts and such. For the past 2 days we've been
working with the Prodigy browser to make it work with our own
Shops.Net software.
For those developing CGI scripts and expecting them to work with
Prodigy here are two things you should know about the Prodigy
browser:
1. It does not handle recursive forms. The HTML 2.0 spec regarding
the FORM tag states that if the ACTION part is missing the browser
should assume the URL for the document itself. (check section 3.13.3
of the HTML Working Group RFC) Anyway, the Prodigy browser "assumes"
that you're already there and doesn't re-call the script!
2. To fix the above problem you'll have to explicitly place an
ACTION tag in your FORM tag that just calls the form again. This is
not a a bad fix/solution and seems to solve alot of other browser's
problems as well. The only thing wrong is that if your script re-calls
itself more than once it still will not work! The Prodigy browser
sees identical ACTION tags and will not reload the script again. ;)
The above problems are still there even if you zero out and turn off
the "Staging" abilities of the browser. There seem to be 3 possible
cache situations with the Prodigy browser:
1. Full caching (both the browser and the gateway/caching host)
2. Half caching (the browser's cache off, but the gateway caching
host is still active OR the browser has some
internal cache that's small and can't be turned
off.)
3. No caching (No intermediary host caching and no browser
caching. A feature that the Prodigy does not yet
have.. I call it "Locked Reload from Host".)
The last option is basically what all other current browsers do with
caching as a "nice supplementary feature" instead of the default.
When we manually "Reload from Host" with the Prodigy browser *all of
our scripts* work nicely. If Prodigy could add the "Locked Reload
from Host" feature it would really have a decent browser but thier
caching techniques (of which one can understand the speed benefits)
will cause both technical and political havoc.
keith
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