Re: Some data related to the frequency of cache-busting

Jeffrey Mogul writes:

 > Drazen Kacar pointed out that I should probably have
 > excluded .shtml URLs from this category, as well, because
 > they are essentially the same thing as CGI output.  I checked
 > and found that 354 of the references in the trace were to .shtml
 > URLs, and hence 10075, instead of 10429, of the references
 > should have been categorized as possibly cache-busted.  (This
 > is a net change of less than 4%.)

Unfortunately, use of server-side-include type schemes (what .shtml is
typically meant to invoke) is not always so easy to detect --- the
Apache web server, for instance, has hooks which allow the same sort
of processing to be applied to *.html files with certain unusual Unix
permission bit settings (XBitHack), and there are people who run the
server configured to treat *all* *.html files as (potentially)
containing server-side includes.  Deliberate cache-busting (e.g., to
enable collection of better metrics) may not be the intent of these
setups, but they currently have something of that effect...

rst