Immutable files, long lifetimes, no revalidation.
Assets are served with a long max-age and treated as immutable. That is safe because a published file is never modified: correcting a stylesheet means publishing a new one and repointing the pages, not editing the old one.
| Class | Lifetime | Revalidate |
|---|---|---|
| Stylesheets | 1 year | No |
| Images and marks | 1 year | No |
| This page | 1 hour | Yes |
Editing in place makes every cached copy wrong for the length of its lifetime, and the copies that are wrong are exactly the ones belonging to people who visit often. The failure is silent, it is worst for the most frequent users, and it cannot be reproduced by whoever made the change — their own cache was cleared by the deploy.
Publishing a new file makes the old one stale instead of wrong. Stale is recoverable.
Assets