FileETag MTime Size

should do the trick I’d think? Or possibly leave off the Size attribute?

Too bad ETag isn’t a proper hash value on the file contents (at least as an option)..

If I do the following, would that be all right, and what happens when I change a css or js file with this configuration?

Header unset ETag
FileETag None
Header unset Last-Modified
Header set Cache-Control "public, no-transform"
Header set Cache-Control "public, must-revalidate"
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 days"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 5 minutes"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 years"
ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 1 years"

Thank you.

askapache says to turn etags off, how do you leave then on for .html files?

Thanks

The Yahoo Developer Best-Practices Exceptional Performance Group are the creators of the yslow extension for firebug that recommends removing them.

But you can’t just remove them or keep them because some blogger or new book says too. You have to do your own research and understand for yourself what the best-practice is.

Etags exists only as an alternative to checking the Last-Modified header as a method of validating the freshness of a file to determine whether it should be re-requested and emptied from the cache, or whether it should stay in the cache.

Even though all proxies are supposed to be following a defined set of standards for handling these types of data, not all do. But one thing is true, if you make sure that you provide at least one valid way for the proxy/client to determine how long the file should be cached, everything else is redundant and was created as an alternative not as a way to clog up the net with unneccessary HTTP headers

.