Re: If-Modified-Since and forged dated

Ari Luotonen writes:
 > 
 > > In the absence of another (cleaner) way to prevent caching this will
 > > become the de facto way for a server to tell a client (or proxy) not
 > > to cache.
 > > 
 > > This, in effect, overloads the Last-Modified header so that 
 > > 
 > > Last-Modified: <date in 2010>
 > > 
 > > means "please don't cache this document."  This is obscure and error prone.
 > 
 > Uh, well, just leaving it out will tell the same thing.  That would be
 > a much better "de facto", doesn't involve forging.  Both NS and CERN
 > proxies support it now.
 > Koen and I suggested that this behavior be at least mentioned
somewhere in the spec as "current practice", since some current
services depend on it, especially in the current world where you can't
really use Expires to suppress caching (because of history list
problems).  If this behavior (not caching documents that omit
last-modified) were to suddenly change, I suspect there would be a lot
of unhappy service operators out there...

 > Cheers,
 > --
 > Ari Luotonen				ari@netscape.com
 > Netscape Communications Corp.		http://home.netscape.com/people/ari/
 > 501 East Middlefield Road
 > Mountain View, CA 94043, USA		Netscape Server Development Team

--Shel Kaphan

Received on Wednesday, 16 August 1995 10:42:00 UTC