Comments on: CSS CacheBuster

By: pragnienie

pragnienie — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 14:23:54 +0000

Your bookmarket is great ;-) even if you are designer ;)

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 15:56:12 +0000

Adding ?foo was the solution my coworkers came up with when they were manually editing the stylesheet link, and yes, occasionally the server will actually cache a stylesheet with the same query string value. The bookmarklet actually adds a timestamp (for instance ?1187096080951) to the link url, and therefore is always unique.

By: Stefan Hayden

Stefan Hayden — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 22:29:50 +0000

My understanding is that every time you want to force a reload of CSS (or any static file) you need the change the value that is after the ?. so ?version=1 and then ?version=2 and so on. if the value is always the same the browser can still think it has screen.css?foo because that was what the file was called last time. I've also tried to detail a similar approach on my own site. The bookmarklet is a great touch for developing.

By: decimus

decimus — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 00:42:15 +0000

We will see how it works in practice…
regards!

By: Duncan Brown

Duncan Brown — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 17:21:49 +0000

This has been an absolute lifesaver.
Many, many thanks.

By: Ivan Zhekov

Ivan Zhekov — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 10:43:00 +0000

This technique is quite good, unless you use, as in my case, query parameters to determine how the css to be parsed.

Even then it’s good for applying multiple skins on the same css file, which is what I do.

To sum up — use the technique only if the css is not server side generated and is GET parameter dependent.

Cheers, Ivan.

By: Gary Barber

Gary Barber — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 06:27:03 +0000

Server side caching is the bane of my life at times. I have come across some implementations of pages (php) on apache servers where the use of ?x after the URL or the external links (like above) just doesn’t work at all. The page still gets cached and the externals. The only way around this I have found, please someone tell me a better way. Is to call an include that generates a server processor request (random number will do). You don’t have to use the number generated, just do the server process.

By: Jack Keller

Jack Keller — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 00:53:52 +0000

Seems reasonable, It’s just too bad designers/developers don’t deploy solutions for this by default. That would make the readers job much easier.

By: Mytskine

Mytskine — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 23:35:21 +0000

Instead of using an URI of “style.css?foo”, using a random number would be more efficient.

IMHO, the best way to handle the caching process of css and js is to serve them with Perl/PHP/… You can then set the cache parameters by sending the right header.

By: Jason Beaird

Jason Beaird — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 20:48:27 +0000

Good point Dennison. I should have mentioned that above. Ctrl+Refresh (IE) and Shift+Refresh (Firefox) are handy if the caching issue is client-side, but my issue was server-side so unfortunately that didn’t work.