A footer year is not the last edit

The year is a string someone typed

A line such as “© 2019 Example Org” is content. A template can leave an old year in place while the rest of the page changes, and a new year can be typed onto a page nobody has otherwise edited. The digits do not carry a timestamp of their own.

Read it as a claim the page makes about a copyright year. Do not read it as the server’s record of the last write.

Other clocks sit beside it

The Last-Modified header, when the server sends one, is the server’s date for that response. The time you fetched the page is when you looked. A version-control date, if the organization gave you the repository, is a third clock. None of these is the footer year unless you have shown they match.

If Last-Modified is absent, write “no Last-Modified header.” Do not fill it with the footer year.

What to write down

File the URL, the footer string, the fetch time, and the header if it was present. If you say “last updated,” name which clock you mean. A sentence with a bare year will be read as the edit date unless you label the footer.

Lab: a 2019 footer on a page fetched with a 2026 header

https://example.org/about, a page on a lab site you control, shows “© 2019” in the footer. The response you saved on 2026-11-03 includes Last-Modified: Tue, 02 Oct 2026 14:00:00 GMT. A draft says the about page has not changed since 2019.

The note lists the footer string, the header, and the fetch time as three facts. The 2019 is not the edit date. The header is not rewritten to 2019 to match the template. Whether the October header is trustworthy is a separate question for the person who runs the server. The public record does not settle it by the footer alone.

url: https://example.org/about
footer text: © 2019 Example Org
fetched: 2026-11-03T11:20:00Z
Last-Modified: Tue, 02 Oct 2026 14:00:00 GMT
write: three clocks
not: unchanged since 2019