andrewmcleod
Well-known member
[gmod]Discussion on browser caching split from Cambrian Covid update[/gmod]
Caching in general is not an antiquated thing from the days of dial-up; it is an important part of the web. If no pages or content were cached, either locally or on servers, vastly more content would be downloaded than required. For example, various popular JavaScript libraries will be cached by your browser so once you've seen a particular version once, you won't load it again even on a different website - let alone reloading every images, JavaScript library and CSS file every time you look at a new web page
Then on the server side caching is critical for major websites as part of load-balancing.
The trick is to make sure your page caching policies are correct so that dynamic content isn't cached
It's not a flaw, it's a (misused) feature
Stuart France said:I?d just like to mention the subject of browser caching. Technically, this is a major design flaw (I?m being polite here) which dates back to the days of dial-in internet connections which were very slow, but it remains the 21st Century default. Simply turning caching off globally in your browser may simply replace one problem with another. On a Windows browser you generally press F5 or click on Reload to fetch the latest page version, otherwise your browser will display any old cached page it still has, and you would not know whether the page you are then seeing has been superseded or not.
This leads to people complaining that ?your website never changes? or ?your information is obsolete? when that?s not the case if only their browser presented the latest page version by default. So news items may not get through to people unless they know about F5 etc.
We?ve just disabled browser caching across the entire Cambrian website (i.e. explicitly for every page) so when you next reload one of our pages (having pressed F5 etc for a final time to get it) then our pages will not cache again, so you?ll always see the latest version on future visits to our site. If anyone notices any problems with this change, then please let our webmaster know via an email.
Stuart France
CCC C&A Officer
Caching in general is not an antiquated thing from the days of dial-up; it is an important part of the web. If no pages or content were cached, either locally or on servers, vastly more content would be downloaded than required. For example, various popular JavaScript libraries will be cached by your browser so once you've seen a particular version once, you won't load it again even on a different website - let alone reloading every images, JavaScript library and CSS file every time you look at a new web page
Then on the server side caching is critical for major websites as part of load-balancing.
The trick is to make sure your page caching policies are correct so that dynamic content isn't cached
It's not a flaw, it's a (misused) feature