[boogiepop]

https://github.com/hbiyik/script.module.cachecontrol

Above is the kodi addon version of Cache Control, it uses HTTP 1.1 mechanism like the one your browser does and is very compatible with requests.

i have been using this lately since i have moved from urllib2 to requests and gave up my purist attitude

HTTP Caching Mechanism:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#page-74

HTTP Cache Control:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#page-108

it is also possible to do custom caching strategies with thislike time based caching etc...