Re: page reloads

Kee Hinckley writes:
	...
   However, even
 > that won't work with some caching servers, so you need to go one more step.
 > When the "takeorder" script redirects back to the order form, have it pass
 > a unique argument everytime (e.g.
 > http://www.somewhere.com/order.html?Defeat-Cache=3Dxxx, where xxx is the
 > result of "time(0)" or something).  The html file will ignore the argument,
 > but the presence of the argument will defeat any caching mechanism.
 > 

There are problems with this approach.  If you have a page A that
contains a link in the form you suggest to document B, and you have already
viewed page A and followed the link to B, if you "back up" to A with
browser navigation commands, and then follow B again, you may still
get the *old* document B (because the browser might cache B).  This is
precisely where where browsers should respect "expires:", and where
some current ones do not.  Moreover, if browsers did respect the
expires header, the "cache-buster" in the URL would not be needed.

--Shel

Received on Wednesday, 31 May 1995 13:19:36 UTC