Journal: Explorer and the cache...

I'm writing this web server which presents dynamic pages to the browser for various purposes. Because of the nature of the server, I have to reuse the same URL for different content frequently. So in the header I send back to the browser I turn caching off. In the meta headers I turn caching off. In the header expiration date, I make the date 0. In every single broswer I can dig up, The browser responds to the first method properly and asks for a new copy of the page... But not explorer. No instead: If the URL doesn't change, NONE of the server side or browser specific methods work worth a ding-dangle. My solution: I put a random number variable in the URL and amazingly the brain-dead URL cache mechanism requests a new page, but get this. If I don't turn any of the cache thingies on, it still fetches the page. Methinks the problem is a quite literal implimentation of the cache concept based purely on the URL content and nothing else.

But maybe it's a feature and not a bug...