On Tue, April 18, 2006 6:39 pm, Paul Novitski wrote: > At 04:12 PM 4/18/2006, Richard Lynch wrote: >>If however, you want to be sure the browser doesn't cache the image, >>because it is dynamic, just add some randomness to the URL. >> >>Technically, that means the browser WILL cache it, but you'll never >>use the same URL twice, so you won't really care. > > > But the user might care. This will artificially inflate the user's > computer's internet cache -- an insignificant load if they visit this > one site just a little, but potentially significant if they visit it > a lot or if doing this became common practice on the net. When the browsers in question (mostly Microsoft Internet Explorer) want to solve this problem by actually following standards [*] consistently, I'll be happy to fix my code. > Or the programmer might care. It feels very inelegant to me to keep > generating trash with no automatic trash collection in place. I'd be > somewhat mollified if some of those cache-suppression techniques were > used to keep things cleaner at the user's end, but still... Why > create an engine that produces an unlimited stream of garbage when > it's so easy to make it all finite? Because the browsers do *NOT* behave correctly! If you think it's so easy to make it all finite, then you clearly aren't understanding the problem. And, actually, the browsers will expire and garbage-collect the images. Presumably through some kind of sensible least-used-expire rule, though you never know. If you don't care that some users are not going to see what they need to see on your site, then you just go right ahead and try it with your caching headers. Run regression tests on a LOT of older browsers and see how it works. My position is: The browser is screwed up, and I cannot fix it. I can only work around it. If that causes a problem for the people who wrote the browser, and people who use that browser, then maybe they'll actually fix, or cause to be fixed, the original bug. I doubt it, though, as they're too busy adding some new lame-ass feature with lots of buzzwords like Web 2.0 or something. :-) * When MS decides to not follow a standard, and then publishes a conflicting standard instead, with no technological reason/improvement driving their "new" standard, that doesn't count as following a standard. That just makes their browser geometrically worse. -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
