Re: AW: [xml-dev] RFC for XML Object Parsing

[Arjun Ray <arjun.ray@verizon.net>]

[Default] On Sun, 23 Mar 2014 12:11:47 -0600, Brian Aberle
<xmlboss@live.com> wrote:

| Call it what you may, HTTP 1.0 didn't have it.  It was added to HTTP
| because it was needed.

I'm afraid your historical recall is faulty.

The fact of the matter is that caching was taken seriously quite
early.  From an archive of the early years of the www-talk mailing
list (referenced at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-talk/2013SepOct/0002.html): 

	http://inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/0237.html
	http://inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/0433.html
	http://inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/0453.html

What eventually became HTTP/1.0 was initially named HTTP2 - because it
was the second spec.  The original spec was like Gopher, and had no
provision for header fields at all. (When HTTP/1.0 was finally named,
this precursor was then jokingly dubbed HTTP/0.96)  

The initial drafts of HTTP2 were by Tim Berners-Lee and Dave Raggett,
in early 1993.  The Last-Modified header date back to then, with hints
that the HEAD verb could be used to determined the modification status
of a document. This was superseded by Roy Fielding's "conditional GET"
proposal in early 1994

	http://inkdroid.org/tmp/www-talk/3465.html

This was implemented in servers (and caching servers) before the
-ahem= market-leading browsers (a recurring tale on the web, sigh).
 
And eventually, the official HTTP/1.0 spec had If-Modified-Since:

	http://www.rfc-base.org/txt/rfc-1945.txt