A More Aggressive Approach to Caching

  One other approach to sites like www.microsoft.com would be to use caching
software which can be set to ignore the wishes of the content publisher,
caching material based on rules written by the cache administrator despite
the wishes of the authors. Ignoring cookies and caching everything for
administrator-set periods based on URL's regardless of headers is quite
technically feasible. And do we really mind annoying Microsoft?
  Not a general solution, I know, but there will be sites where a
significant proportion of traffic is to only a very small number of servers,
and it is thus worth the administrator's time and effort to tune for what
those servers do.
  This would require cache networks to be built with a clear understanding
of who is and who is not doing this sort of thing, but hopefully simple
statements of a cache's HTTP/1.1 compliance - YES, CONDITIONAL, NO - would
suffice for most purposes.

- Donald Neal

--
Donald Neal               | Anita and Donald Neal are delighted to announce
Systems Programmer        | the birth, on Friday, 27 September, of Peter
The University of Waikato,| Alexander Neal (3470g), younger brother of
Hamilton, New Zealand     | Martin. Mother and baby are both very well, if
                          | not sleeping as much as you might hope.
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