Every time when there’s a debate about the format of something that floats around the Internets, people go to RFCs in order to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong. Which may be a great thing in theory. In practice, the rocket scientists that wrote those papers might squeeze a lot of confusion into a single page of text, as the G-WAN manual states.

Today’s case was a debate about the Expires header timestamps as defined by the HTTP/1.1 specs (RFC 2616). If you read the 14.21 section regarding the Expires header, you can see the following statement:

The format is an absolute date and time as defined by HTTP-date in section 3.3.1; it MUST be in RFC 1123 date format:

Expires = “Expires” “:” HTTP-date

I made a newb mistake in thinking that the RFC 1123 dates are legal Expires timestamps. Actually, by proof reading 3.3.1 of RFC 2616 you may deduce the following: the dates in use by the HTTP/1.1 protocol are not the dates into the RFC 1123 format, but the actual format is a subset of RFC 1123. The debate started around the GMT specification which in the HTTP/1.1 contexts is actually UTC, but it must be specified as GMT anyway. Even more, +0000 which is valid timezone specifier as defined by RFC 1123 is not valid for Expires timestamps. Although some caches accept +0000 as valid timezone specifier for the HTTP timestamps, some of them don’t.

It isn’t that the RFCs are broken per se, but the language they use can be very confusing sometimes.