URL: thou shall not vary?

>> >That is not a bug in IE5, that is the exact behavior required by the
>> >standard.  Back is supposed to show the old page you have seen before,
>> >not fetch a new copy.  See for example section 13.13 of rfc2616.
> 
>> but this is obtuse to a user. why should a user perceive 
>> any difference between a page they got from going back 
> >and a page they got from going forward? In highly dynamic
> >web applications this caching of back business is a big problem with 
> >the http standard

>HTML was designed to serve up more or less static pages.  One souce of
>information per URL.  Anything dynamic that has been added on is a cheap
>hack.  You are very lucky that anything dynamic works at all. If you
>want to serve dynamic data, I suggest using Java applet in your page.
>Then you can be as dynamic as you want.

I must disagree -- in many cases some form of dynamic pages is quick, cheap,
easy and convenient; often far more so that cobbling up some java applet. 
Yes, it introduces a bit of complexity in caching and refresh behavior, but it's
nothing that can't be dealt with by a little bit of good design (and by adhering
to a few simple specs).

Received on Tuesday, 29 June 1999 13:58:29 UTC