mhonarc-users

Cacheing and mhonarc indexes

1998-02-19 14:34:03
Hi all

I've been pondering something about the impact of cacheing (both 
locally and via proxy servers), and its impact on mhonarc indexes.  
If this displays some ignorance of HTTP specs, I plead guilty :)

Basically, an index page is updated whever the archive is modified, 
but if a user has cached an earlier copy of the index, that won't 
refclect the changes.  So, every time a user looks at the index, 
should he/she reload it?

Or is the http protocol clever enough to ensure that if a page is 
requested fom a proxy server that returns a cached copy, the proxy 
will first ensure that the cached page is up-to-date, and request a 
fresh copy if necessary?

I was wondering about using the "expires" META tag to expire pages.  
But unfortunately, from what I understand of the specs, this tag only 
allows specification of an absilute date, not of an offset, which is 
a bit limiting.    I would like to be able to specify a 24 hours" 
value for "expires", because whilst an absolute day of now+24hours 
would work fine whilst the archives are current, I don't like to 
think of the ugliness of indexes to old periods being 
permanently stamped as "expired". 

Can anyone help me get my head around this?

Thanks,
Claire


-- 
Claire McNab -- Claire(_at_)siberia(_dot_)demon(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>