Re: Last-Modified vs. Expires

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On Mon, 21 Jul 97 15:11:51 -0700 Duane Wessels wrote:

> dgaudet@arctic.org writes:
>
> >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.

The SSI mechanisme of Apache is used mostly for including *static* files but
the result looks like a dynamic page to the proxy with no Last-Modified
and no Expires (if Expires is not explicitly configured by the webmaster).
BTW: On our webserver *every* (static) page uses SSI.

If this is the default behavior of Apache, a lot of static pages on the web
look like dynamic pages and will not be cached by any proxy anymore.

> >I'm curious, what works better with squid?
>
> I think Expires would be preferable, and especially
> if you can get long Expires values (e.g. days instead of minutes).

Ok we could use Expires (instead of Last Modified) but only if it's possible
that Apache sends per *default* reasonable Expires for all objects.
(with default I mean with its standard configuration.)

Duane, my argumentation are driven by my experience as webmaster *and*
proxy manager in a real world environment:
Technically I agree that Expires is the better mechanisme than Last-Modified
but if we expect that a majority of webserver will not be configured
to set a reasonable Expires it's much better to use Last-Modifed for
SSI-documents which are not dynamic.

Ernst

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