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Some data changes all the time. The home page of CNN.com is constantly updating every few minutes. On the other hand, the home page of Google.com only changes once every few weeks (when they put up a special holiday logo, or advertise a new service). Web services are no different; usually the server knows when the data you requested last changed, and HTTP provides a way for the server to include this last-modified date along with the data you requested.

If you ask for the same data a second time (or third, or fourth), you can tell the server the last-modified date that you got last time: you send an If-Modified-Since header with your request, with the date you got back from the server last time. If the data hasn't changed since then, the server sends back a special HTTP status code 304, which means “this data hasn't changed since the last time you asked for it”. Why is this an improvement? Because when the server sends a 304, it doesn't re-send the data. All you get is the status code. So you don't need to download the same data over and over again if it hasn't changed; the server assumes you have the data cached locally.

All modern web browsers support last-modified date checking. If you've ever visited a page, re-visited the same page a day later and found that it hadn't changed, and wondered why it loaded so quickly the second time -- this could be why. Your web browser cached the contents of the page locally the first time, and when you visited the second time, your browser automatically sent the last-modified date it got from the server the first time. The server simply says 304: Not Modified, so your browser knows to load the page from its cache. Web services can be this smart too.

Python's URL library has no built-in support for last-modified date checking, but since you can add arbitrary headers to each request and read arbitrary headers in each response, you can add support for it yourself.

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ETag/If-None-Match