Demystifying HTTP Headers for a Better Web @ SpaceCityJS

Ever wonder exactly what combination of Cache-Control, Last-Modified, Expires, ETag, Vary, and Pragma headers will keep your content cached by browsers just long enough? And what exactly is a HTTP 304 anyway? In this talk, you’ll learn the history behind the available HTTP caching headers, what their values mean, and how browsers and proxies react. You’ll learn the best practices on client cache invalidation, the benefits of sending a Not Modified response, and briefly talk about the changes in HTTP 2.0 (SPDY) around caching — and then you’ll put your new-found header skills to the test!

Transcript

1. Demystifying HTTP Headers
   for a Better Web
   Andrew: @adunkman
   

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2. http caching
   

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3. shared caches
   

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4. Expires, Vary
   Cache-Control
   Conditional Requests
   The Future of Caching
   

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5. Expires, Vary
   Cache-Control
   Conditional Requests
   The Future of Caching
   

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6. Wed, 14 May 2014 22:36:20 GMT
   

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7. Vary: User-Agent
   

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8. Vary: Accept-Encoding
   

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9. Expires, Vary
   Cache-Control
   Conditional Requests
   The Future of Caching
   

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10. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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11. no-cache
    no-store
    no-transform
    max-age
    s-maxage
    must-revalidate
    proxy-revalidate
    max-stale
    public
    private
    

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12. max-age
    must-revalidate
    private
    public
    

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13. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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14. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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15. Last-Modified
    If-Modified-Since
    

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16. Etag
    If-None-Match
    

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17. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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18. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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19. 
    

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20. Link: ; rel=prefetch
    

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21. 
    

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22. Link: ; rel=subresource
    

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23. SPDY
    

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24. mod_spdy
    

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25. X-Associated-Content:
    "full-url":
    

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26. Expires, Vary
    Cache-Control
    Conditional Requests
    The Future of Caching
    

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27. mnot.net/cache_docs
    adunkman/http-cache-demo
    

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28. Thank you!
    Andrew: @adunkman
    

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