Re: [Sks-devel] SKS, Content-Length and HEAD requests

[Jonathan Oxer]

On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 13:20 -0400, Phil Pennock wrote:
> On 2010-11-02 at 16:20 +0100, Marian Kechlibar wrote:
> > The main principle would be to issue a HEAD request first, instead of
> > a GET request.

> You've just added an extra round trip for the cases where the request is
> specific, which makes things slower.

My reading of Marian's suggestion was that it would be optional, not
required, so clients that are operating in constrained conditions could
choose to do the HEAD request followed (depending on the result) by a
GET request. Other clients could operate as normal by issuing a GET
request initially.

Phil's suggestion of a limit variable seems good, but there's also a
third option that may be worth considering: a command specifically to
retrieve metadata about a query result without retrieving the result
itself. There could be a command issued as a GET request in the same
format as a regular search, but rather than returning the result it
would return things like the number of results and the content length of
the full result set in a machine-parsable format. Or it could just be an
argument appended to the regular search.

-- 
Jonathan Oxer
Ph +61 4 3851 6600
Internet Vision Technologies: www.ivt.com.au

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