[Zope-dev] Medusa and HTTP/1.1

[Seb Bacon]

I've been yelling at my ISP (BTopenworld) for having a badly configured
transparent proxy cache, which caches all content *unless* the source
specifies otherwise.  It's been really messing up my development, and of
course it's a concern for my users too.  Hopefully they'll sort it out.

Anyway, while I was researching for ammunition, I read all the HTTP/1.1
specs (RFC2068).  Interestingly although the RFC strongly recommends
making unvalidated objects uncacheable, it stops short of forbidding it.
I wondered if it might be a good idea to make the ZServer more HTTP/1.1
compliant, by always adding validators to all objects (at present
validators are only added to image / file objects).  This is the
recommended behaviour for servers.  

In the case of the ZServer, I guess the correct behaviour would be to
have every page object return a Last-modified header, which defaults to
the modified date of the newest component of the page.  This behaviour
could then be modified using cache managers like the Accelerated HTTP
Cache Manager.  

Just wondered what anyone else thought.

seb