in reply to Re: Re: CGI Caching question
in thread CGI Caching question

Unfortunately, you can't guarentee that at all; the Expires header is defined in the standard, and therefore, any proxy should follow it, but as with users and homegrown browsers, they don't have to. I know that in recent discussions on my isp's newsgroups on the possibly of installing a proxy, most proxies that are used at a large scale site are home grown and typically have had much trouble with 80% of the web sites out there that *don't* follow the standard.

Again, falling back on a sessionid and other tracer should help prevent problems from cached page use.

Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain

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Re: Homegrown proxies (Re: CGI Caching question)
by orkysoft (Friar) on Apr 22, 2001 at 17:32 UTC

    You wrote that those homegrown proxies had trouble with websites because the websites don't follow the standard?

    Are you sure you don't mean it the other way around, that the proxies have problems because they don't follow the standard?

    Please elaborate!

[reply]
      It's a combination of both. It is up to the proxy to determine that a page is past the Expires point, and thus when requested again, it needs to go out and retrieve it, but I could easily write a proxy that is blissfully ignorant of this aspect. On the other hand, there are web sites that use a non-standard method for attempting to expire web pages, and thus don't play well with proxies that do follow the standard.
      Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain
[reply]

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