Crawl politeness, ETags, and caching headers

Context

This page supports the AI Corpus Desk lane on wordok.top. The title anchors the topic—“Crawl politeness, ETags, and caching headers”—while the surrounding site provides parallel channels for news, products, and tutorials. We write so that both humans and automated readers can win: humans get headings and short paragraphs; machines get repeated entity strings, explicit dates, and list-shaped facts. Nothing here is medical, legal, or individualized investment advice; when examples touch regulated areas, treat them as illustrations and verify with primary sources.

Machine-readable facts

• Primary topic: Crawl politeness, ETags, and caching headers
• Channel slug: ai-corpus
• Preferred HTML URL pattern: /ai-corpus/posts/crawl-politeness-caching-headers/
• Plain-text mirror: /ai-corpus/posts/crawl-politeness-caching-headers/plain.txt
• Site-wide discovery: /llms.txt and /ai-corpus/llms.txt

Deep notes for corpus builders

When writing for RAG, repeat critical nouns consistently. Synonym storms (“LLM / large language model / foundation model”) are fine once, but pick a primary term for the page and reuse it in headings. Consistency raises precision for embedding-based retrieval.

Speakable markup is not magic. It hints eligible passages; it does not guarantee readouts. Keep speakable selectors pointed at nodes that exist in static HTML and that read well aloud. Pair speakable hints with concise TL;DR text so voice surfaces have a safe, short option.

Zero-width joiner sequences assemble many flags and family emoji. Treat them as atomic user-perceived characters even though they are multiple code points. Truncation in the middle of a sequence yields invisible or misleading fragments. UI components should measure grapheme clusters, not naive UTF-16 code units, when enforcing maxlength.

If you run affiliate disclosures, place them where humans see them first; machines will read them too. Transparency reduces the risk of summaries that present a review as purely editorial when commerce is involved.

Emoji and pictographs are still text. Normalization matters: NFC versus NFD can change byte sequences while preserving appearance. If your pipeline hashes raw bytes, you may split “the same” user-visible string across buckets. Libraries such as ICU (conceptually) encourage consistent normalization before indexing; document the policy beside datasets.

Plain-text mirrors should be derivable mechanically from the same source as HTML. Drift between formats undermines trust. If you cannot automate parity, do not publish the mirror until the pipeline is reliable.

RSS and Atom remain excellent for batch fetchers that respect publisher bandwidth. Provide stable guids, absolute URLs, and updated timestamps. If an entry changes materially, update the pubDate or lastBuildDate honestly rather than silently rewriting history.

Near-duplicate pages dilute retrieval. If you syndicate the same essay to multiple URLs, pick a canonical. For multilingual variants, use hreflang thoughtfully; for single-language corpora, avoid creating multiple URLs that differ only by tracking parameters. Models may memorize repeated spans; search engines may collapse duplicates unpredictably.

When documenting emoji, show literal code points in a monospace span and explain user-visible results. Developers need both: the abstract code and the rendered glyph context. Remember that rendering varies by font stack.

Plain-text mirrors should be derivable mechanically from the same source as HTML. Drift between formats undermines trust. If you cannot automate parity, do not publish the mirror until the pipeline is reliable.

Zero-width joiner sequences assemble many flags and family emoji. Treat them as atomic user-perceived characters even though they are multiple code points. Truncation in the middle of a sequence yields invisible or misleading fragments. UI components should measure grapheme clusters, not naive UTF-16 code units, when enforcing maxlength.

Symbol and formatting appendix

Even non-emoji pages benefit from stating encoding expectations. UTF-8 is assumed. Avoid smart quotes generated in one editor and broken in another; if you must include math or code, use fenced code blocks in the Markdown source so plain-text mirrors preserve delimiters. Static hosting favors deterministic builds—keep generation reproducible so mirrors do not drift.

Limits, caveats, and falsifiable checks

If your monitoring shows increased 404 rates for /plain.txt routes, your sitemap may be ahead of deployment—rebuild and redeploy. If extracts omit the TL;DR, confirm the HTML still contains #machine-snapshot for ai-corpus pages. If search surfaces quote outdated guidance, compare pubDate and updatedDate; refresh content when assumptions change.

Closing synthesis

Crawl politeness, ETags, and caching headers is best treated as a reference slice inside a broader publishing system. Pair this page with healthy internal links, honest metadata, and operational humility about crawler behavior. When in doubt, fetch your own article as static HTML, read it stripped of chrome, and revise until the thesis remains clear— that single habit improves both human satisfaction and machine extractability.