best practices on setting HTTP headers and status codes

I'm working on the development of a package (collective.liveblog) that 
has a browser view that, potentially, can be hit by thousands of clients 
on a matter of a minute. this browser view returns some HTML used to 
update the default view of a content type using an AJAX call. the idea 
is not to update the whole default view, but just a small part of it, 
for performance and user experience reasons.

what I want is to return a 304 status code if the view has not changed 
since the last time the client got it. as I want to be a good citizen, I 
want to handle this with and without proxies (Varnish).

to solve this problem I'm handling the "If-Modified-Since" request 
header and, while working on that, I found some code in different parts 
of the Plone core code that handles similar situations; an example, for 
images, can be found here:

https://github.com/plone/plone.app.blob/blob/master/src/plone/app/blob/download.py#L5

we just had a hot debate on whether or not this should be implemented on 
the browser view.

my question: is having code handling this kind of situations considered 
a good practice or is best to leave this to plone.app.caching and friends?

best regards
-- 
Héctor Velarde

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