Re: Issues-list item "CACHING-CGI"

The more I think about it, the more I think the right thing to do is not
to return the current time as Last-Modified: but (if this makes sense)
return the last modified date fore the data used to generate the response.
This would have to be the CGI programmer's call. In the mailing list
example, the natural thing to do would be to return the creation date of
the most recent digest included in the archive or (more simply) the last
modified date for the directory (under Unix, at least).

For this approach to be useful, the CGI program would have to be able to
respond intelligently to HEAD requests, and return last modified dates
and perhaps entity tags. Perhaps what we need is separate draft on CGI and
caching, and perhaps a draft on CGI for HTTP/1.1. Someone (Jeffrey
Mogul?) suggested I write one at one point, but it was simply impossible
at the time. If this would be useful, I'd be willing to give it a try.

I do, however, see this as being essentially orthogonal to the process of
moving HTTP/1.1 to draft status, so this is kind of late in the game. 

---
gjw@wnetc.com    /    http://www.wnetc.com/home.html
If you're going to reinvent the wheel, at least try to come
up with a better one.

Received on Wednesday, 16 April 1997 10:13:39 UTC