Karen AKA Kajikit wrote:
Brion VIBBER wrote:
They should use a browser that's not so
brain-dead that it can't tell
that the forward and back buttons are for zipping through pages that are
already open and should not be loaded all over again.
not true.
Yes, true. Alas, not everyone lives up to my high standards. ;)
The recent changes page used to remain the same when
you went back to it
unless you manually told it to reload, but now if you use the back
button to go back to a list page it reloads it from the server even if
you don't particularly want it to. If I want to save time I have to
right-click and say 'open in new window' all the time and it wastes my
time and energy. I would be VERY much in favour of that change being
made.
And don't tell me that my browser is braindead. It didn't used to do
this. The wikipedia was changed, not netscape.
Netscape 4.x being braindead is not mutually exclusive with the wiki's
output changing. In fact, it's the conjunction of both that causes the
problem.
Currently the wiki sends out a number of cache-suppressing headers
which, I believe, were introduced to keep Internet Explorer from showing
you the previous version of a page after you save an edit:
Expires: 0
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Netscape 4.x and Internet Explorer (at least the 5.5 I have) are so
overzealous about these that they force a reload even when using the
forward and back buttons. Mozilla (and presumably Netscape 6 and 7) are
saner about this, and consider the page still open -- forward and back
aren't page load events, they're just showing you things you've already
opened again.
I'm not the one that added those, so I don't know exactly what they're
meant to battle against, or under what circumstances they are necessary,
or how they might be appropriately tweaked to maintain whatever alleged
benefit without breaking the angry browsers.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)