Question Why does content served from jQuery’s CDN lack far-future expire headers? (or, What

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Asked: June 6, 20262026-06-06T23:31:44+00:00 2026-06-06T23:31:44+00:00

Question Why does content served from jQuery’s CDN lack far-future expire headers? (or, What

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Question

Why does content served from jQuery’s CDN lack far-future expire headers? (or, “What am I doing wrong here?”)

Background

I’m using jQuery and jQuery Mobile on a web project. To serve these scripts, I use jQuery’s CDN, per their directions. However, I’ve noticed that these resources are served without far-future expires headers, which prevents browsers from being able to cache them intelligently.

Although the jQuery servers will respond with 304 Not Modified, that’s not the same as an expire header the negates that request altogether. I realize the simple answer here is “because they don’t” however, I’m wondering why they don’t, and if there’s some way I can serve this content, ideally from a CDN, with far-future expires headers.

Thanks for your time.

Examples

jQuery CDN

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.6.4.min.js

Response:

HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Date: Wed, 16 May 2012 00:05:27 GMT
ETag: "9e68e84-16615-6ad9bfc0+gzip"
Last-Modified: Mon, 12 Sep 2011 22:55:03 GMT
Server: ECS (dca/532A)
Vary: Accept-Encoding
X-Cache: HIT

Google CDN

https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.6.4/jquery.min.js

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
age:134505
cache-control:public, max-age=31536000
content-encoding:gzip
content-length:32103
content-type:text/javascript; charset=UTF-8
date:Mon, 14 May 2012 10:45:15 GMT
expires:Tue, 14 May 2013 10:45:15 GMT
last-modified:Mon, 02 Apr 2012 18:24:28 GMT
server:sffe
status:200 OK
vary:Accept-Encoding
version:HTTP/1.1
x-content-type-options:nosniff
x-xss-protection:1; mode=block

Note the far-future expires date in expires:Tue, 14 May 2013 10:45:15 GMT