Using ICP for differences

I've been scouring my mail folders in vain; maybe I deleted it by accident.
There was a study done by someone on delta-encoding document differences
to update cached data, which suggested it was beneficial, as often the
content of HTML documents changes only slightly between updates.
 
As an extension to HTTP, it would have to be implemented through the
standards effort in many servers and agents.

It occurred to me that it could be implemented much more readily
between cooperating caches. One would send the output of something like
"diff -e|gzip".

Hmm, one would double the size of cache keeping old versions around,
and might have to rely on ETag and therefore HTTP/1.1 servers to identify
versions ...
Well, it was just a thought.

Andrew
Received on Mon May 12 1997 - 11:03:48 MDT