<b>This week in caching: the case for serving stale on purpose</b>

<b>This week in caching: the case for serving stale on purpose</b>
Three reads that reframe "old" cache as a feature, not a bug.
— <b>stale-while-revalidate, explained properly</b> — Harry Roberts' walkthrough of <code>Cache-Control: max-age=60, stale-while-revalidate=3600</code> shows how to serve the stale copy instantly while a background fetch refreshes it; the latency win is felt, not measured.
— <b>stale-if-error as a free uptime layer</b> — the RFC 5861 companion directive keeps your site up when origin 500s; gold for anyone running thin infra.
— <b>Fastly's SWR support matrix</b> — their docs clarify which CDNs honor it at the edge vs only in-browser (Chrome yes, Safari historically no).
<b>Bookmark:</b> Roberts' piece — the mental model of "correct now, fresh soon" sticks.