Re: Improving If-Modified-Since

At 7:03 PM 8/14/95, Lou Montulli wrote:
>I've been getting lots of bug reports due to corrupted or out dated
>caches.  I would like to propose an extension to the If-modified-since
>header to improve the situation.  I'd like to start sending
>
>If-modified-since: DATE; size=SIZE

It seems like the correct solution is to eliminate the problem with
corrupted caches rather than tweaking the standard yet another time.

>I have tested this change against the Netscape, NCSA, CERN and Apache
>servers and all of them ignore the addition of size=SIZE, so we
>can add this addition without fear of backwards compatibility concerns.

This will break MacHTTP and WebSTAR. According to the last published
"standard", the if-modified-since header field's argument (the date) is
terminated with an end of line sequence. This is how it's currently parsed
in both of those servers. Given the large installed base of these servers,
it'd be nice to find an alternate solution.

--_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
Chuck Shotton                               StarNine Technologies, Inc.
chuck@starnine.com                             http://www.starnine.com/
cshotton@biap.com                                  http://www.biap.com/
                 "Shut up and eat your vegetables!"

Received on Tuesday, 15 August 1995 05:02:23 UTC