REST: Fielding 6.5.2

Reviewing Fielding's thesis yet again, I noticed a sentence that I think has not gotten as much exposure as it should

What makes HTTP significantly different from RPC is that the requests are directed to resources using a generic interface with standard semantics that can be interpreted by intermediaries almost as well as by the machines that originate services. -- Fielding

Emphasis added.

If I'm doing it right, I can put a commodity cache in front of my origin server, and it will be able to do useful work because it understands the semantics of the meta data in the HTTP traffic.  The cache doesn't need any special knowledge about my domain, or the payloads being exchanged.