Meaning of header fields Date: and Age:

What do these fields mean ?

 

According to "the spec", RFC2616 the Date header is the date/time the
message was generated at the origin server.

 

1. Date

In a cache server, assuming the message is now resident in the cache and has
been requested by a HTTP client. Should the cache server send with message
with:

 

a)       the Date header as it received it from the origin server

b)       generate a new Date header being the date/time the message is sent
from the cache and calculate the age as the residence time

 

2. Age

Does the Age header represent the seconds relative to the date/time in the
date header. So if the Age is say Age: 60 and the time is 03:00:00, then its
birth time (for a want of a better word) is 02:59:00. If this is the case,
then surely the correct calculation of corrected_received_age in 13.2.3
should be

 

            now - date_value + age_value

 

Can anyone comment ?

 

--Greg

Author, FreeProxy