On 5/5/05, John Panzer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I assume an HTTP Expires header for Atom content will work and play well > with caches such as the Google Accelerator > (http://webaccelerator.google.com/). I'd also guess that a syntax-level > tag won't. Is this important?
Yes, and yes. This is exactly the sort of software that we're talking about when we say that HTTP's native caching mechanism is widely supported. All the proxies in the world (which is what Google's Web Accelerator is, except it runs on your own machine and listens on port 9100) are able to reduce network traffic and therefore make the end user's experience faster because they understand and respect the HTTP caching mechanism. (Google Web Accelerator does other things too, like proxying requests through Google's servers. And what are those servers running? Another caching HTTP proxy.) Many ISPs do this at the ISP level, both to reduce their own upstream bandwidth costs and to make their end users happier. Many corporations do this as well (I would bet good money that IBM does it). At one time, I even had Squid installed on my home network to do this. <http://www.squid-cache.org/> HTTP caching works. > The HTML solution for people who could not implement Expires: seems to > be META tags with in theory equivalent information. Though in practice > the whole thing is a mess, this seems like a conceptually simple > workaround. Is there something obviously wrong with it? Other than being a God-awful mess? No, there's nothing wrong with it. ;) -- Cheers, -Mark
