[whatwg] Proposal: add attributes etags & last-modified to <link> element.

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 2:25 AM, Julian Reschke <julian.reschke at gmx.de> wrote:
> Resources that should be cached (stylesheets, images) but change at
> unexpected times are indeed a problem.
>
> A well understood approach is to push some kind of version indicator into
> the URI (such as query parameter).

This is usually workable in my experience, I agree, and I'd be
interested to know of use-cases where it's not close to optimal.  The
only advantage I can see offhand to this proposal is that it allows
you to convey the info using a header, without modifying the HTML
source.  This could be useful on sites that cache HTML output heavily.
 Wikipedia currently uses query strings for version indicators, and
while things usually wind up working okay for logged-out users (whose
HTML is heavily cached), I'm pretty sure it's mostly because the old
version usually still works okay.  I'll forward this proposal to a
couple of Wikimedia people who would know more and see what they
think.