Open Zimmi48 opened 9 months ago
Isn't there a way to control the browsers' cache policy?
This Stack Overflow answer from 13 years ago suggests adding:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="CACHE-CONTROL" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="PRAGMA" CONTENT="NO-CACHE">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Expires" CONTENT="-1">
A no caching should actually be solved on the server side with response headers, not in the HTML. See this answer for a more up-to date perspective: https://stackoverflow.com/a/2068407/22862809
So (if I understand what you referring to, I have just skimmed through the code) caching should be disabled for all things under the distrib/current folder.
That said, there are also potentially issues with how the redirects are performed in those pages: the best again would be the server directly issuing the redirect, in this case maybe with an HTTP status code of 303: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/303
Alternatively, a redirect from JS, similar to how it happens in 404.html, while the page is showing something like "You are being redirected in 5 secs: click this link if that does not happen..." is also a common solution.
Thanks for the feedback! Unfortunately, GitHub Pages doesn't provide the option for server-side configuration. However, if I understand you correctly, the JS-based redirection that was implemented in #232 is not subject to the same caching issue?
I thought I had seen some nginx configuration somewhere...? But as said I have just skimmed the repo.
No, the redirects under distrib/current are not robust (but it's not easy to give you references here), but I meant that as a separate issue: which might be contributing to the caching issue on some client platforms, but not necessarily.
Anyway, I mean redirects from HTML headers are "not robust" just as much as it is not robust or even hardly supported anymore to set no caching from HTML headers.
I thought I had seen some nginx configuration somewhere...? But as said I have just skimmed the repo.
There used to be an Apache server (before migrating to GitHub Pages, cf. #233), so it's possible that some remains of (unused) Apache configuration can be found in the repo.
This is a serious issue in the case of:
The redirection is supposed to be to the current version of the doc, but after updating the HTML redirects (which happened automatically when merging #222), users that had previously clicked on this link can still be redirected to the previous version.
Unfortunately, I do not see any solution to this issue besides:
cc @maximedenes FYI