304 and Age

Hi all,

maybe a dumb one, but I couldn't find any decisive anchor for the following question: suppose my cache receives a conditional GET for a resource for which it has a fresh representation, should Age be sent back to the requester in a 304 ?

The two points in the current spec that got me confused are:

- p6, Section 4: "When a stored response is used to satisfy a request without validation, a cache MUST include a single Age header field in the response with a value equal to the stored response's current_age."

- p4, Section 4.1 after the paragraph listing the mandatory headers for 304 (which do not include Age): "Since the goal of a 304 response is to minimize information transfer when the recipient already has one or more cached representations, the response should not include representation metadata other than the above listed fields unless said metadata exists for the purpose of guiding cache updates (e.g., future HTTP extensions)."

TIA, Thomas.

Received on Monday, 8 October 2012 14:04:55 UTC