[10077] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: HTTP HEAD requests for Last-Modified info
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marc Salomon)
Thu Jun 20 17:19:49 1996
From: "Marc Salomon" <marc@ckm.ucsf.edu>
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 14:12:46 -0700
In-Reply-To: Larry Masinter <masinter@parc.xerox.com>
"Re: HTTP HEAD requests for Last-Modified info" (Jun 20, 11:38)
Reply-To: marc@ckm.ucsf.edu
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
>|Caching is essential to HTTP scalability in the near-term.
|Actually, caching can work without Last-Modified, as long as the
|origin server sends Expires and an ETag.
Right. But in the near term HTTP 1.0 caches and user agents won't understand
Etag but do understand Expires and how to send an If-Modified-Since
conditional request. On the other end, many resources served through HTTP 1.0
do not have an explicit Expires value.
"The more information a server can send with a resource to describe its
expiration characteristics, the better for caching" seems like a good rule of
thumb.
-marc
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