This is just my take on the issue. @Home caches. AOL caches. Browsers cache. (does the Direct/PC service cache?), many, many ISP's cache. Many companies cache. Caching is a fact of life. From my point of view any advertiser that does not take caching into account is screwing themselves and their customers. We cache. I try to configure our cache to err on the side of fresh content, rather than err on the side of hit rates. Every once in a while we get a customer complaint about a specific site and we address the issue on a case by case basis. So far complaints are fairly uncommon. We are not a backbone provider. Our cache is only available to customers that subscribe to our "security" services. (Just a note most of our customers have less then 300 users and although our firewall services are not air tight, I think we do a decent job of protecting our customers. If these customers did not have this service from us, most of them would have no protection at all. I'm just amazed at how much smaller business just don't seem to care about network security.) Making your site cache friendly is not rocket science. Putting reasonable expires information on objects is not tough. Telling your web server to set the expires as a percentage of the age of the document is supported in some servers. Using client side forms validation is not really that much tougher than using server side validation. Many SSI web pages are not really dynamic. We use SSI extensively on our web sites to create a consistent look and feel. Of course, some SSI pages are dynamic and should not be cached. I do think that it's utterly unacceptable for a backbone provider to force their customers to use their cache. I do, however, wish that more backbone providers would provide caching services to those people what want the service. --Eric Wieling

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John Fraizer <John.Fraizer@EnterZone.Net> 6/29/98 6:20:31 PM >>> <snip>

So, If someone is using site exec, etc in their code, and their provider/webmaster/mother didn't set up Progma: nocache, they're effectively screwed...erm...cached, right? <snip> Fantastic. So, lets say I'm Joe Banner Advertizer. Company X has paid me present their banner. They wanted to limit the amount of money they spent so, they had me code my servers to only display their banner X times per day since I bill them on impressions. Backbone provider Z installs one of your boxes. By default, no matter how many connections on the limited....erm...client side of the box are initiated to retrieve a "fresh" banner from our banner-farm, you send them Company X until the cache times out.