12.3 Transparent Negotiation


Transparent negotiation is a combination of both server-driven and agent-driven negotiation. When a cache is supplied with a form of the list of available representations of the response (as in agent-driven negotiation) and the dimensions of variance are completely understood by the cache, then the cache becomes capable of performing server- driven negotiation on behalf of the origin server for subsequent requests on that resource.

Transparent negotiation has the advantage of distributing the negotiation work that would otherwise be required of the origin server and also removing the second request delay of agent-driven negotiation when the cache is able to correctly guess the right response.

This specification does not define any mechanism for transparent negotiation, though it also does not prevent any such mechanism from being developed as an extension that could be used within HTTP/1.1.