http 1.0 backwards compatibility: expires vs cache-control:max age

[jaredhirsch]

Again, been reading RFC 2616 all day, might be missing an implementation detail, but: it seems like Expires headers are backwards compatible with HTTP 1.0, while max-age headers are not. (I don't have good examples of relevance except that, IIRC, Squid doesn't support 1.1, only 1.0.) Not a huge thing, but then, why not fix it?

Any disadvantage to switching to Expires?

[shane-tomlinson]

If I remember right, @lloyd and I did a bunch of testing with IE8 and how it acted when combined with ETags. The problem is, I don't know if I remember right.