- 1) Introduction
- 2) Notational Conventions and Generic Grammar
- 3) Protocol Parameters
- 4) HTTP Message
- 5) Request
- 6) Response
- 7) Entity
- 8) Connections
- 9) Method Definitions
- 10) Status Code Definitions
- 1) Informational 1xx
- 2) Successful 2xx
- 3) Redirection 3xx
- 4) Client Error 4xx
- 1) 400 Bad Request
- 2) 401 Unauthorized
- 3) 402 Payment Required
- 4) 403 Forbidden
- 5) 404 Not Found
- 6) 405 Method Not Allowed
- 7) 406 Not Acceptable
- 8) 407 Proxy Authentication Required
- 9) 408 Request Timeout
- 10) 409 Conflict
- 11) 410 Gone
- 12) 411 Length Required
- 13) 412 Precondition Failed
- 14) 413 Request Entity Too Large
- 15) 414 Request-URI Too Long
- 16) 415 Unsupported Media Type
- 17) 416 Requested Range Not Satisfiable
- 18) 417 Expectation Failed
- 5) Server Error 5xx
- 11) Access Authentication
- 12) Content Negotiation
- 13) Caching in HTTP
- 1) ..
- 2) Expiration Model
- 3) Validation Model
- 4) Response Cacheability
- 5) Constructing Responses From Caches
- 6) Caching Negotiated Responses
- 7) Shared and Non-Shared Caches
- 8) Errors or Incomplete Response Cache Behavior
- 9) Side Effects of GET and HEAD
- 10) Invalidation After Updates or Deletions
- 11) Write-Through Mandatory
- 12) Cache Replacement
- 13) History Lists
- 14) Header Field Definitions
- 1) Accept
- 2) Accept-Charset
- 3) Accept-Encoding
- 4) Accept-Language
- 5) Accept-Ranges
- 6) Age
- 7) Allow
- 8) Authorization
- 9) Cache-Control
- 10) Connection
- 11) Content-Encoding
- 12) Content-Language
- 13) Content-Length
- 14) Content-Location
- 15) Content-MD5
- 16) Content-Range
- 17) Content-Type
- 18) Date
- 19) ETag
- 20) Expect
- 21) Expires
- 22) From
- 23) Host
- 24) If-Match
- 25) If-Modified-Since
- 26) If-None-Match
- 27) If-Range
- 28) If-Unmodified-Since
- 29) Last-Modified
- 30) Location
- 31) Max-Forwards
- 32) Pragma
- 33) Proxy-Authenticate
- 34) Proxy-Authorization
- 35) Range
- 36) Referer
- 37) Retry-After
- 38) Server
- 39) TE
- 40) Trailer
- 41) Transfer-Encoding
- 42) Upgrade
- 43) User-Agent
- 44) Vary
- 45) Via
- 46) Warning
- 47) WWW-Authenticate
- 15) Security Considerations
- 16) Acknowledgments
- 17) References
- 18) Authors' Addresses
- 19) Appendices
- 20) Index
- 21) Full Copyright Statement
- 22) Acknowledgement
14.9.6 Cache Control Extensions
The Cache-Control header field can be extended through the use of one or more cache-extension tokens, each with an optional assigned value. Informational extensions (those which do not require a change in cache behavior) MAY be added without changing the semantics of other directives. Behavioral extensions are designed to work by acting as modifiers to the existing base of cache directives. Both the new directive and the standard directive are supplied, such that applications which do not understand the new directive will default to the behavior specified by the standard directive, and those that understand the new directive will recognize it as modifying the requirements associated with the standard directive. In this way, extensions to the cache-control directives can be made without requiring changes to the base protocol.
This extension mechanism depends on an HTTP cache obeying all of the cache-control directives defined for its native HTTP-version, obeying certain extensions, and ignoring all directives that it does not understand.
For example, consider a hypothetical new response directive called community which acts as a modifier to the private directive. We define this new directive to mean that, in addition to any non-shared cache, any cache which is shared only by members of the community named within its value may cache the response. An origin server wishing to allow the UCI community to use an otherwise private response in their shared cache(s) could do so by including
Cache-Control: private, community="UCI"
A cache seeing this header field will act correctly even if the cache does not understand the community cache-extension, since it will also see and understand the private directive and thus default to the safe behavior.
Unrecognized cache-directives MUST be ignored; it is assumed that any cache-directive likely to be unrecognized by an HTTP/1.1 cache will be combined with standard directives (or the response's default cacheability) such that the cache behavior will remain minimally correct even if the cache does not understand the extension(s).