Re: HTTP Expire Header for /check/referer

On Wed, 10 Jul 2002, Mikael Lind wrote:

> site. For convenience, I link to the validator using
> <http://validator.w3.org/check/referer>. The problem with this is
> that the validator results are cached within my browser (I use Opera
> 6.04 for Windows 98), meaning that I get outdated results, and
> somtimes results for the wrong page. Have you considered adding a
> HTTP Expire header? I searched the list archives for "expire" and
> found this post:

Cacheability of validator results is a Good Thing.
Unfortunately, in the case you describe, it is also a Bad Thing.

As a point that may be of more academic than practical relevance,
the correct behaviour of /check/referer would be not to mess about
with Expires headers, nor even to restrict cacheing with cache-control,
but to make it clear that content negotiation is happening based
on the HTTP Referer header.  In other words, it should include
"Referer" in a Vary: response header.

> --
> I wished for 4 uncursed scrolls of gold detection
> and all I got was this lousy .signature

On a pedantic note, that's not a valid .sig.

-- 
Nick Kew

Available for contract work - Programming, Unix, Networking, Markup, etc.

Received on Wednesday, 10 July 2002 16:42:01 UTC