Issue 1417555: have SimpleHTTPServer return last-modified headers (original) (raw)

Created on 2006-01-28 19:24 by aaronsw, last changed 2022-04-11 14:56 by admin. This issue is now closed.

Messages (5)
msg49421 - (view)	Author: Aaron Swartz (aaronsw)	Date: 2006-01-28 19:24
This patch modifies the SimpleHTTPServer to serve Last-Modified headers with its responses, which allows browsers to cache the result, preventing annoying reloads of image files every time you view a page, and so on. Fixes 1417554.
msg49422 - (view)	Author: Jim Jewett (jimjjewett)	Date: 2006-02-01 16:32
Logged In: YES user_id=764593 If the server doesn't handle the If-Modified-Since header on requests, does this really help much? (I suppose it does give browsers something to use as a heuristic.) But adding that to Simple doesn't really make sense. Adding it to BaseHTTPServer might.
msg49423 - (view)	Author: Aaron Swartz (aaronsw)	Date: 2006-02-01 18:04
Logged In: YES user_id=122141 Yes, it does help. RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1 spec) says "HTTP caches typically assign heuristic expiration times, employing algorithms that use other header values (such as the Last-Modified time) to estimate a plausible expiration time" and indeed major browsers and caches actually do this. Why doesn't it make sense to add this to SimpleHTTPServer? SimpleHTTPServer serves files from disk; this patch grabs the last-modified time for those files. It certainly wouldn't fit in BaseHTTP -- how would it know what the Last-Modified time would be?
msg49424 - (view)	Author: Jim Jewett (jimjjewett)	Date: 2006-02-02 14:09
Logged In: YES user_id=764593 Sorry, I wasn't clear enough. Adding the Last-Modified to responses created by SimpleServer makes perfect sense. I had been (wrongly) thinking it was only useful in conjunction with a possible "304 Not Modified" response. Adding the 304 logic to a "simple" server may not fit, but adding it to BaseServer (and calling it from SimpleServer, which has the file's timestamp) would be reasonable.
msg49425 - (view)	Author: Georg Brandl (georg.brandl) *	Date: 2006-02-17 13:35
Logged In: YES user_id=1188172 Thanks, I committed a similar patch (your date handling was suboptimal).