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The author doesn’t mention this but if you want your server to respond with 304 status codes you will need to implement ETags [1].

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/ET...

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You can implement Last-Modified instead.

It’s often not that easy to figure out the last modified when serving up a web page. There might be multiple DB records for that page. Hashing the page into an etag often easier to implement.

Sure, I was simply pointing out that one doesn't need to implement ETags to have 304 responses.

I mean sure, technically you can send any status code from your origin application. ETag is generally the standard way to go about it with regards to web servers. Last-Modified is more of a fallback mechanism.

Acting like Last-Modified is somehow substandard is a bit disingenuous. The If-None-Match (etag) request header takes priority over the If-Modified-Since (last-modified) request header (if both are sent), but they provide identical functionality (caching and preventing modification if out of date) and are both part of the HTTP standard.

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