Expire Header

[shapper]

Hello,

I am using Yahoo Best Pratices and I get a suggestion for my web site:

"Add an Expires header"
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires

What does this means?
Should I add something on my pages head section?

Thanks,
Miguel

 

[richard]

Hello,

I am using Yahoo Best Pratices and I get a suggestion for my web site:

"Add an Expires header"
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#expires

What does this means?
Should I add something on my pages head section?

Thanks,
Miguel

I have no idea what they're claiming but it definitely does not go
into html.
This is something that would be applied to the server itself. Not the
web page.

 

[Roy A.]

Header in this case, means an http-header.
http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec14.html

Should I add something on my pages head section?

You can change this on the server or in a server-side script. But
don't bother to much, it will make your site harder to develop and
maintain. In most cases it will be better to let the browser handel
the cache. Maybe the most used pages on Yahoo would benefit from this,
but non of them are static.

I have no idea what they're claiming [...]

Neither do I. I can't imagine where that might be useful except from a
static html archive, where the same user is visiting the same page
multiple times, and is likely to do that for long period of time. I
would say that "best pratice" would be the opposite, and that it
rarely would be best to 'implement an "Never expire" policy'.