On Thu, Oct 19, 2000 at 06:36:03PM +0100, Andrew Bangs wrote:
5. There's NOTHING in it for the website owner, other than the possibility that SOME pages might display faster for SOME users.
It's worse than that. Many large providers, including at least a couple of tier 1's that I know of, are transparently proxying port 80 traffic for purposes of caching. If you don't make your pages cache friendly, you are potentially sacrificing a large amount of 'traffic' as people behind such caches will experience problems with the page. Making your pages inoperable with caches will not eliminate the caching; it'll simply send your traffic to your competitors.
If folks running networks really think website designers and owners should care about caching, then there needs to be some sort of benefit (perhaps paid in dollars) to those affected. Otherwise, there's little reason for them to care.
Think again. When potential customers dollars walk to the competition, you will start caring. I'm not going to pay you so that my customers can visit your site and buy things from you -- that's completely out of the question. --msa