[5264] in www-talk@info.cern.ch

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Re: Caching Servers Considered Harmful (was: Re: Finger URL)

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Roy T. Fielding)
Mon Aug 22 21:11:53 1994

Date: Tue, 23 Aug 1994 03:06:50 +0200
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Errors-To: listmaster@www0.cern.ch
Reply-To: fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU
From: "Roy T. Fielding" <fielding@simplon.ICS.UCI.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list <www-talk@www0.cern.ch>

John Labovitz writes:

> I just looked through the NCSA httpd source code and found
> no way to specify an Expires: header for a file.  If this
> was a CGI script, I know I could add one myself, but how
> do I tell the server to send an Expires: header for an
> ordinary HTML or GIF file?
> 
> I realize this is getting off track, but it'd be nice to
> be able to specify HTTP headers for random files.  For the
> Unix environment, perhaps file `foo.html' could have an
> associated `foo.html.hdr' file that the HTTP server knows
> to look for, and adds any headers found there (like Expires).  
> This would also be a solution to the problem of moved files 
> -- if I rename `foo.html' to `bar.html', then `foo.html.hdr' 
> could contain `Location: bar.html' (is that right?), without
> having to modify httpd's config file.

Yep.  See <http://www.ics.uci.edu/WebSoft/MOMspider/WWW94/meta.html>
for a discussion of these issues.  The servers do not support it yet,
but you could always hack a server to make it work.  Eventually,
someone will implement visible metainformation.


...Roy Fielding   ICS Grad Student, University of California, Irvine  USA
                   (fielding@ics.uci.edu)
    <A HREF="http://www.ics.uci.edu/dir/grad/Software/fielding">About Roy</A>

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