[10075] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: HTTP HEAD requests for Last-Modified info
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Salomon)
Thu Jun 20 13:38:31 1996
From: "Marc Salomon" <marc@ckm.ucsf.edu>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 10:30:10 -0700
In-Reply-To: Dave Cole <dcole@netcarta.com>
"RE: HTTP HEAD requests for Last-Modified info" (Jun 18, 22:56)
Reply-To: marc@ckm.ucsf.edu
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
Dave Cole <dcole@netcarta.com>
|Returning of Last-Modified is server dependent.
draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-05.txt [1], what will be HTTP 1.1 strongly encourages
sending Last-Modified:
|HTTP/1.1 servers SHOULD send Last-Modified whenever feasible.
Caching can't function to its potential if servers don't advertise L-M whenever
possible. Caching is essential to HTTP scalability in the near-term. Server
authors: N.B. above.
And both above and RFC1954 [HTTP 1.0][2] discuss possible meanings for
Last-Modified based on the type of resource to which a method applies:
|The exact meaning of this header field depends on the implementation of
|the origin server and the nature of the original resource. For files, it
|may be just the file system last-modified time. For entities with
|dynamically included parts, it may be the most recent of the set of
|last-modify times for its component parts. For database gateways, it may
|be the last-update time stamp of the record. For virtual objects, it may
|be the last time the internal state changed.
-marc
[1] http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/draft-ietf-http-v11-spec-05.txt
[2] http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/rfc1945.txt
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