If-Modified-Since is a HTTP conditional request header, where last modification date is the condition.
The request header If-Modified-Since
is used to conditionally request HTTP resources which have not changed since the previous request.
If the original response was cacheable and contained a valid Last-Modified
response header (a RFC 822 datetime), the user agent (browser) may send this datetime with the next request (this is one of the "cache revalidation" mechanisms of HTTP); if the resource was not modified, the server should respond with a 304 Not Modified
instead of sending the content body - which is then served from client's cache. This header is only applicable to GET requests.
If-Modified-Since
is to Last-Modified
as If-None-Match
is to ETag
.
See RFC 2616 for the official definition.