User browsers also, by the way, if left to their defaults, as of 2016, as I continuously discover (we do a LOT of changes and updates to our site) also fail to check for last modified dates on such files, but the query string method fixes that issue. This is something I've noticed with clients and office people who tend to use basic normal user defaults on their browsers, and have no awareness of caching issues with css/js etc, almost invariably fail to get the new css/js on change, which means the defaults for their browsers, mostly MSIE / Firefox, are not doing what they are told to do, they ignore changes and ignore last modified dates and do not validate, even with Expires: 0 set explicitly., The list is just examples of different techniques, it's not for direct insertion. If copied, the second would overwrite the first and the fourth would overwrite the third because of the http-equiv declarations AND fail with the W3C validator. At most, one could have one of each http-equiv declarations; pragma, cache-control and expires., This Stack Overflow page explains how to set HTTP headers for cache control in web development, including examples and best practices..