Re: HTML and not being cached!!

Murray Altheim (murray.altheim@nttc.edu)
Tue, 1 Aug 1995 10:26:39 -0400

>On Mon, 31 Jul 1995, Christian Dackus wrote:
>
>> My que[s]tion:
>>
>> How can I prevent my HTML-page from being cached. I want my HTML-page to be
>> uploaded from a server everytime the user asks the page. This is because
>> this page changes constantly.
>>
>> Thanks,
> could try the expires content tag, but i'm not sure if all servers
>support this, and i'm not absolutly sure if this is correcet html (it
>could be netscapian). But I use it on some of my pages and use our
>locally wriiten perl server and it works ok. Oh you may have trouble
>with proxy server caches too.
>
>hope this is some help
>
>mike

Netscape's method uses their own ADD_DATE and LAST_VISIT attributes to help
keep track of when to update the cache. I'm not aware of which if any
browsers support it, but the only HTML-compatible element that is designed
to handle this is the META tag, which is what I'm assuming Mike is
referring to ("expires content tag"):

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires"
CONTENT="Tue, 04 Dec 1993 21:29:02 GMT">

which is straight from Tim and Dan's June 16th HTML 2.0 draft [1]. If
browser designers were to follow anything (and Lord knows, they don't
always), they would hopefully follow that. However, I don't believe the
date format is specified.

Murray

[1] http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_5.html#SEC30

__________________________________________________________________
Murray M. Altheim, Information Systems Analyst
National Technology Transfer Center, Wheeling, West Virginia
email: murray.altheim@nttc.edu
www: http://ogopogo.nttc.edu/people/maltheim/maltheim.html