Increasing precision of Last-Modified header to allow sub-second granularity?

Not sure where to ask this, but . . . 

Has there been any thought or discussion of allowing the Last-Modified
header to (optionally) carry more precision that one second, for the
benefit of clients that wish to reliably detect when a server has
changed its output faster than once per second?  For example:

  Last-Modified: Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:21:10.011483 GMT

Note that it is possible to get around the current one-second limitation
using ETags, but it would be nice if finer precision could be indicated
directly in the Last-Modified header.

I'm assuming that this is out of scope for the current HTTPbis charter,
so I'm mostly asking this regarding potential future work.  But the
"Potential Work" page is almost empty, and hasn't been updated in 16
months:
http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/httpbis/trac/wiki/PotentialWork

Has this been discussed?  If not, does the suggestion belong?

Thanks

-- 
David Booth, Ph.D.
http://dbooth.org/

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Received on Tuesday, 31 January 2012 18:32:27 UTC