Re: Expires, Last-Modified, Pragma: no-cache etc.

Benjamin Franz (snowhare@netimages.com)
Thu, 17 Aug 1995 10:38:31 -0700 (PDT) 

On Wed, 16 Aug 1995, Balint Nagy Endre wrote:

> It is an interesting question: there are any good reasons to forbid
> clients to cache documents in its non-shared cache? Doubtful, I think.
> But if anybody can give good examples explaining the need for this,
> then we shall consider adding the function proposed by "Pragma: no-local-cache",
> but (see later)

YES! Shopping basket applications and highly dynamic documents *require* 
total defeating of caches at every stage. The results otherwise are 
extremely ugly as the user's idea of what is going on becomes radically 
unsynchronized from what the server thinks is going on. Believe me - 
Expires: does not cut it at all. Too many browsers have either truely 
broken implementations or no implementation at all. Mosaic is a particular 
offender on that front.

The cleanest solution to the whole problem is no-cache.

-- 
Benjamin Franz