Can somebody clarify this caching question?

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1

A Chrome audit on a site I’m working on suggests that I ‘leverage browser caching’, and goes on to say;

The following resources are missing a cache expiration. Resources that do not specify an expiration may not be cached by browsers

This, to me, is an ambiguous use of the word may. Do they mean ‘browsers might not cache’ or ‘browers are not permitted to cache’?

It’s a small but important distinction.

2

If they adhere to RFC2119 - and I guess they do- the word “may” should be interpreted as “might”

3

Thanks for that ScallioXTX, but what if the author of the message isn’t familiar with RFC2119?

I’m still not clear on the issue. From what I’ve been reading, it seems that browsers are permitted to cache at their discretion any resources that do not specify a cache expiration.

4

But most of the time users don’t configure caching on their browser. Does anyone know how browsers cache this kind of content out of the box?

5

It may or may not cache depending on how the user configures the browser.