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View Full Version : Help! I'm confused!

Trane
11-13-1998, 10:27 PM
Something I say quite often since beginning my home page. This concerns the pages I have completed so far. I don't understand why I often have to hit "reload" on my WEBTV keyboard in order to see the background and images, and to hear the music I have on my pages. I'm concerned that other viewers will just get the basic blah background and text. Not all the cool stuff that's really there. Any suggestions or thoughts will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Trane
Del
11-13-1998, 11:14 PM
When you view a webpage, your browser stores certain things in temporary memory (called cache) to avoid having to re-download it every time. You'll find that it's most common with images. You may have noticed how sometimes it'll take a while for a certain background to load the first time, but after that it seems to pop up much faster. That's because your browser has cached that image in it's own memory (it also saves on bandwidth).

One of the things you can do to combat this situation is to add this line in the <head> section of your page;

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="Mon, 02 Nov 00:00:00 GMT">

That will tell the browser to check and see if it's been updated since the last time the page was viewed, and (since the date is in the past) the browser will always be faked out into thinking that the page is new. You really only want that line in there if you're changing your page often though, because it can increase download times and bandwidth usage.

Another thing you could do is to put "Always updated, press [Reload] often." somewhere on your page. The drawback to that is that it's not so professional looking.

All browsers end up dumping their cache eventually anyway (mine is set to dump daily, and compare age every time, but I don't know as browsers other than Nutscape have that ability). Sooner or later your visitors will find the new updated page, and then it will be cached and do the same thing all over again :-)

At least your not running later versions of netscape, there's a bug in it since version 4.06 in which the 'check to see if its been modified' routine is broken or something. Really bungles things for chat scripts, because the messages page doesn't actually show the newwest posts!

Now, that was a really long answer, and probably didn't answer your question in the slightest. Unfortunately, caching is one of those things that we have to live with... Just go ahead and keep updating your pages, they will be seen eventually. I've used the <meta expire> tag for some time, and don't have much of a problem with pages not updating for the viewers. If you want (and if you can view source with webtv), feel free to read the source code of my pages at downinit.com to see just how that meta tag is inserted.

Hope this wasn't too confusing or long winded (although I know it was)

Del