[11348] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
URL: thou shall not vary?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel Hellerstein)
Tue Jun 29 13:59:31 1999
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 13:04:17 -0400
From: Daniel Hellerstein <DANIELH@MAILBOX.ECON.AG.GOV>
To: www-talk@w3.org
Resent-From: www-talk@w3.org
>> >That is not a bug in IE5, that is the exact behavior required by the
>> >standard. Back is supposed to show the old page you have seen before,
>> >not fetch a new copy. See for example section 13.13 of rfc2616.
>
>> but this is obtuse to a user. why should a user perceive
>> any difference between a page they got from going back
> >and a page they got from going forward? In highly dynamic
> >web applications this caching of back business is a big problem with
> >the http standard
>HTML was designed to serve up more or less static pages. One souce of
>information per URL. Anything dynamic that has been added on is a cheap
>hack. You are very lucky that anything dynamic works at all. If you
>want to serve dynamic data, I suggest using Java applet in your page.
>Then you can be as dynamic as you want.
I must disagree -- in many cases some form of dynamic pages is quick, cheap,
easy and convenient; often far more so that cobbling up some java applet.
Yes, it introduces a bit of complexity in caching and refresh behavior, but it's
nothing that can't be dealt with by a little bit of good design (and by adhering
to a few simple specs).
