Quote:
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Originally Posted by Chrysalis
what would happen if the page was updated
and Cache-Control: max-age=3600 was after the update?
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A simplistic approach to this is to consider a web page as a collection of objects referenced by an html object. As the content publisher you apply appropriate expiry times to your objects e.g. images tend not to change very much, so you might expire them in a month. Your html might change more often so give html objects expiry times of 3600s.
If you apply inappropriate expiry times then you risk browsers and caches storing your content for longer than is correct. The usual rule of thumb is to keep the html objects small and with short expiry times (or mark it uncacheable) and mark the larger objects with longer expiry times. The larger objects are the ones that you don't want being downloaded all the time anyway, since it will both load your web server and give users the impression that your page is slow.
If you want to change the page and objects completely then change all the objects' names and then you can start afresh.
More details are at
http://www.web-caching.com/mnot_tutorial/ (might have posted that link before)