265167 - Page Info screen does not accurately report Expires and Modified http-headers.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: Page Info, defect)

Description

[Ken Johanson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a4) Gecko/20040927
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8a4) Gecko/20040927

Usually just a "(no expiration set)" displayed for the Expires field and
sometimes modified shows not-set when a Last-Modified header is sent (see
example URL).

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Load http://www.kensystem.com/mozilla/date-headers.jsp
2. Open page-info (CTRL-I)


Actual Results:  
Both date fields shown as not-set (for me)

Expected Results:  
Reflect dates in headers (and possibly overridden with html-equiv/prama tags,
whicg are not provided in the sample URL)

Comment 1

[Olivier Vit (just a reporter)]

You try to set dates to something else than a 'zero' date 
"Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 GMT" as you do currently ?

In fact, it seems that Page Info is designed to reflect what the browser cache
thinks about when the page will expire, no to show the headers (this is why
livehttpheaders has its own pane in Page Info)

Comment 2

[Ken Johanson]

livehttpheaders is an extension, not a standard component. And a user arguably
shouldn't have to install a plugin to see when the page was modified or expires;
this features is built in (and works) on all other browsers. Arguably the page
info's modified and expires dialog should reflect exactly what the headers
indicated, just as does Javascripts document.lastModified property.

In any case, the '(no expiration set)' values of the page-info screen would
imply that the browsers cache "doesn't know" when to expire the page
(non-deterministic) --which is clearly isn't the case since the cache mechanism
will re-check the server on each request, and it DOES obey the expiry headers
(it re-fetches the page).

Comment 3

[Ken Johanson]

I've done some more research on this bug - the Page info screen (using some form
controls now on http://www.kensystem.com/mozilla/date-headers.jsp): 

'Modified' displays 'not set' if the date is on Unix epoch (a day later _does_
show a date). Based on my testing from a negative timezone (GMT -0700), it
appears that page info doesn't understand how to date-format pre-epoch dates (31
Dec 1969 ...).
'Expires' shows 'not set' if Last-Modified is in the past. As memory servers, a
certain RFC says that even if the last-mod date is in the past (or some
non-standard value such as "0" or "-1"), the cache SHOULD reload (ie the past
date is still a valid indicator and shouldnt be regarded as 'not set')

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

This is an automated message, with ID "auto-resolve01".

This bug has had no comments for a long time. Statistically, we have found that
bug reports that have not been confirmed by a second user after three months are
highly unlikely to be the source of a fix to the code.

While your input is very important to us, our resources are limited and so we
are asking for your help in focussing our efforts. If you can still reproduce
this problem in the latest version of the product (see below for how to obtain a
copy) or, for feature requests, if it's not present in the latest version and
you still believe we should implement it, please visit the URL of this bug
(given at the top of this mail) and add a comment to that effect, giving more
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If it is not a problem any longer, you need take no action. If this bug is not
changed in any way in the next two weeks, it will be automatically resolved.
Thank you for your help in this matter.

The latest beta releases can be obtained from:
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Seamonkey:   http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

Comment 5

[Ken Johanson]

Problem still exists on DeerPark 1.5

Comment 7

[Philip Chee]

Modified is now shown correctly. We don't seem to have a expires field these days.
WFM => Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.9.1b4pre) Gecko/20090413 SeaMonkey/2.0b1pre