What's special in July 26th and why is it used in examples for Expires header so often?

Question

I've noticed that July 26th (my birthday) is used really often in various PHP examples related to preventing http caching using Expires header, like:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12398714/cache-issue-with-private-networking-stream

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2833305/how-to-expire-page-in-php-when-user-logout

http://expressionengine.com/archived_forums/viewthread/81945/

What's special in that date?

Answer 1

Probably somebody did that as an example of a cache expires a long time ago and then everybody copied it. Interestingly it's often expressed as "Mon, 26 July 1997", but the actual date occurred on a Saturday. It's not that interesting in terms of UTC seconds (seconds since 1970) since it is 869893200. Maybe it's just an example of CTRL-C/CTRL-V coding?

Answer 2

Only thing I could find was the release of Mac OS 8. Not related to CSS release dates, HTML, XML, PHP, Javascript, Internet Explorer, Nescape Navigator, Apache Foundation, MySQL, or anything else relevant I could wrack my brain for. I suspect it's probably someone's kid's birthday or anniversary or something. In short, it's a coincidence.