Nevel, Simeon writes:
Rather than use the "expires" META tag, I used the "no-cache"
pragma.
Please don't defeat caches needlessly. The only reason to use no-cache
is if something changes every time you request it, not just if it
*could* change. In the case of forums, there ought to be many more
readers than there are writers, otherwise people aren't reading enough,
or they are writing things that no one wants to read.
Instead of defeating caches, work with them by including the
Last-Modified header in output, and by processing the If-Modified-Since
requests that caches will make.
I changed HyperNews to do this last spring in order to enable a cache
(i.e. Squid) to be put in front of the HyperNews server as an
accelerator. This improved performance enormously, and only a few old
browsers had problems and require users to manually forced Reloads. (I
need to convince my current host administrator of this value, but I may
include my own caching "server" on the side.)
Proper use of caching speeds up the internet for servers, clients, and
everyone else who wants to use the bandwidth you save.
Daniel LaLiberte
dlaliberte(_at_)gte(_dot_)com
liberte(_at_)hypernews(_dot_)org
