- User Experience -
- July 12th, 2008,
- 2 Responses
Getting over the Something’s wrong with the styles
- 12 July
You can't even start to imagine how many times my office minions (co-workers) repeat that something I did doesn't work, just for them do discover that the version they see is the cached one.
Even when working on a online project it would be nice to have some sort of control over what the viewers see – preferably the newly changed version.
What I tend to use lately is generating a random marker in the URL while the project is still in development:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/screen.css?<?= rand(0, 9999) ?>" />Which constitutes in the file not being cached in general.
Now, that’s an acceptable solution before the project get deployed. After deployment it would be appropriate to generate a unique release of the template, in my case the catalogue structure would look like the below:
- templates
- release_01_05_08
- css
- img
- js
- flash
- misc
- release_10_07_08
- css
- img
- js
- flash
- misc
Of course the way you divide deployments in unique instances can use a simpler method – versioning for example:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="templates/v1/css/screen.css" />That should solve common caching problems on all major browsers.
2 responses so far. Care to add one yourself?
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Tomasz Rondio July 14th, 2008 at 18:14
ctrl+f5 works great
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Oskar Krawczyk July 14th, 2008 at 20:58
Unfortunately your comment doesn’t even remotely touch the problem issued here. Command+R works fine for end-users, such as you or me, not for clients which mostly aren’t even aware of a button called F5. Also, the transition between style changes should be as seamless as it is possible.
