dre wrote:

Acidus wrote:
There are absolutely no good comprehensive resources that explain HTTP caching directives, cache hierarchies, resolving HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 directives, etc. Where is a 96 page $39.99 O'Reilly book when you need one?

You mean besides RFC 2616, which is free and the "official" source, right? I could literally show you at least 4 O'Reilly books and 2 Addison-Wesley books (ones better than yours) that explain this, btw. Did you read about `no-store'? I find this hard to believe.

The RFCs are nice but dense. O'Reilly's "definitive" Guide to HTTP is woefully lacking solid information about caching. I had to dig into Squid to learn more about only-if-cache and sibling/child caches. There are many books out there that talk about HTTP caching from a performance point of view, but after Expires, LAst-Modified, and E-Tags they lose detail quickly. Shiflet's book looks interesting, and the parts I've seen on Google Books are no-nonsense and clear. Is that on your list?

Yes, I read about no-store.

However some things are still unclear. Do modern caching proxies cache URLs with query strings? By default how excessive can they be? What about cookie assignments? Can I use Set-Cookie as a value in Cache-Control to force their caching? Which caches perform transforms and thus pay attention to no-transform? Will they modify the Content-MD5 header?

My rant stems from the observation that all the information about what gets cached under what conditions for how long and what trumps certain conditions is fragmented all over the RFCs. And what appear to be contradictions are never addressed.

RE: HTTP Caching is bretarded: Or, how I learn to stop worrying and accept that 'no-cache' actually does cache.