RE: Introducing the Service Oriented Architectural style, and it's constraints and properties.

> You'd have to somehow mark the POST as being idempotent, so that the cache 
> would know that it didn't have to get a response from the resource.  

This looks like a good idea to me. It would mark POST requests that should actually be just GETs but, because of reasons like presence of headers, had to be turned into POSTs.

A similar proposal was launched by Hugo Haas a couple of months ago at [1]. His proposal referred to WSDL, but evidently that info should also be carried over the wire for the caching infrastructure to be advised about the nature of the operation.

Ugo

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-arch/2002Nov/0157.html