Some sites courteously post an updat notice on their pages, some don’t.
Is there a way I the (unhacking) surfer can look at the page – it’s file attributes, or whatever, to find out how old it is?
not really and I am with you in that I am often pissed when I have no clue of how old the information on the page may be.
Try the form on this page with your url:
http://www.delorie.com/web/headers.html
If you’re lucky, the resulting headers will have something relevant in the Last-Modifed field. If you’re not, it’ll just be the current time, or the field will be missing altogether.
File -> Properties through your browser will give you a “last modified” date which may help.
A properly configured web server will supply various date headers along with the content you reqyested. Please note that MANY web servers are not configured to provide this optional information. The date you find on a web page has been placed there by the web page developer or by a piece of code that reads the file dates on the server.
With netscape 6+, just click on VIEW, Page Info, etc…it gives some info. IF you can get a FTP display for
a site you can look at the ftp data.
I just clicked on the link above, and it was right about the page on my site I entered. I know my webserver records the timestamps when I upload files via FTP. I didn’t know people could look them up that way.
Pretty spiffy. 
Most of the information at the page linked above is, as handy mentioned, found under View-Page Info in Netscape. In fact, I just used this feature in another thread minutes before reading this one.
I had always assumed Netscape and IE were pretty much equivalent, but I can’t find this feature in my IE 5.5. Did they really omit this, or am I just not searching hard enough?
dqa, its under File:properties
Yep, those are the page properties not the program properties. sigh
They don’t seem to return the same information.
It seems sensible to list the properties of the page under File-Properties, if you consider the page to be a file. However, when I punch that up for this site in IE, I get created and modified April 19, 2002.
When I use View-Page Info in Netscape, I find it was last modified December 12, 2001.
The ‘webpage’ is a collection of files, no doubt those files have a timestamp on the server’s file system.
If you’re using Internet Explorer, you can try typing
“javascript:alert(document.lastModified)”
(without the quotation marks) in the address bar.
Doesn’t work if the site has updating ads, or if the info is unavailable—you’ll just get the current date/time if that’s the case.
I just tried this on one of my pages and it said it was last modified Dec. 20, 1969. I know it’s been updated in the last month or two. Why the bizarre date?