Re: Last-Modified vs. Expires

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Hi Dean,
my argumentation for Last-Modified headers is a repetition for you
but may be it's of some help for others on this list.

On Sun, 20 Jul 1997 17:57:17 -0700 (PDT) Dean Gaudet wrote:

> Hi folks, this may be a bit off-topic.
>
> I'm trying to decide on how to weight some additions to features in Apache
> which assist in generating Last-Modified headers for dynamic html content.
> Others in the group argue that it's better to just use mod_expires and
> generate Expires: headers than it is to try to get a sane Last-Modified
> header.
>
> I'm curious, what works better with squid?

Expires headers are good - but only if they are really set by the
webmaster to reasonable values.

We are using Apache. But because all of our pages have
standard headers and footers using SSI (Server Side Include) all this
static pages are considered by Apache as dynamic and thus don't have a
Last-Modified header!

Because it's not practical to set for each (quasi static) document
an explicit Expires value - we configured Apache to put a default
Expires Header of one day.
Only dynamically generated pages get an individual expires (metafile).

My Opinion:
For default (static) pages and for "default" webmasters
a default Last-Modified header together with reasonable refresh patterns
of squid is the best solution.
Expires are better only if they are (may be) set to reasonable values.

Squiders:
This is a very important topic for the future cachability of documents
delivered from the most common and best webserver actually in use.
All webservers should behave in their *standard configuration* as much
cache compatible as possible.

Most webmaster don't care (know) a lot about this strange parameters
which are used by this strange people at the other end of a small line
to "over there".

Ernst

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Received on Tue Jul 29 2003 - 13:15:42 MDT