[OT] Strange IE5.5 Caching Behavior

[Steve Holden]

"Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams" <ignacio at openservices.net> wrote in message
news:mailman.1000171888.20415.python-list at python.org...
> On Mon, 10 Sep 2001, Steve Holden wrote:
>
> > Sorry about this post being off-topic, but c.l.py is the largest
collection
> > of web-heads I have easy access to. If you know nothing about HTTP,
please
> > ignore this.
> >
> > I'm serving static content, looking at the client's "If-Modified-Since"
> > header, and returning a 304 response if the file's Last-Modified date is
> > before that. When I serve the content I include a "Last-Modified:"
header to
> > identify the age of the file.
> >
> > For some reason the incoming "If-Modified-Since" headers *always* seem
to be
> > three minutes and 27 seconds before the "Last-Modified:" date of the
file.
> > I've searched Google, and Microsoft's Knowledge Base, without finding
> > anything relevant.
> >
> > If anyone knows what's causing this (and even better, how to fix it) I'd
be
> > very grateful for a pointer.
> >
> > regards
> >  Steve
>
> What is the clock skew between the client and server?
>
That would be zero: the client and the server are running on the same
machine.

Using IE 5.5 from a different machine gives exactly the same result, despite
a 50-second clock skew between client and server.

Netscape Navigator 4.7 behaves as I would expect, passing the server's
last-modified time back as the if-modified-since, so the server correctly
responds with a 304 code.

Thanks very much for your reply. I'm wondering whether this is Microsoft
insanity or the usual home-manufactured kind just now!

regards
 Steve
--
http://www.holdenweb.com/