>> >> By acting as you do, we may end up in a huge amount of feeds being sent >> on >> the wire to clients which believe the feed has actually changed in its >> content when it has changed only in one meta-data value (that they will >> not handle anyway). > > > > Servers don't *have* to change the feed's Last-Modified and ETag values > when > a comment count changes. They are free to respond 304 to a conditional > GET, > even if the count has changed. >
Well this is debatable because you effectively change the resource itself and ought to update its meta-data as well (ie Last-Modified and Etag values). Besides, by not doing so can be even worse because an aggregator would requests the feed, the server would respond with a 304 and the aggregator would not even know the count ahs changed in the end. It feels even worse. - Sylvain