On Wed, Jul 19, 2006 at 06:05:35PM +0000, Miciah Dashiel Butler Masters wrote: > Looking at the document, I don't see any headers to indicate that ELinks > should reload it: > > HTTP/1.1 200 OK > Date: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 17:42:19 GMT > Server: Apache/1.3.34 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.26.1a > Vary: Accept-Encoding > Last-Modified: Wed, 19 Jul 2006 17:42:01 GMT > ETag: "8d4622-c8b2-44be6ee9" > Accept-Ranges: bytes > Connection: close > Content-Type: text/html > Content-Encoding: gzip > Content-Length: 18374 > > Do the browsers with which you are familiar actually check every time > when you view a document (presumably using the HTTP If-Modified-Since > header) whether there is a newer copy on the server? > > ELinks could do that, but it would be a little complex, and far too > slow. I can't even stand the behaviour with ignore_cache_control > disabled, which only affects documents that explicitely signal that they > should be reloaded from the server. Such behaviour might be acceptable > if done in the background, but then it would be a bit confusing (you > load the document, you start to read it, then it suddenly updates while > you're in the middling of reading it).
My main browser is Firefox; I use ELinks under special circumstances. Unfortunately, I'm really just a user and don't know how exactly Firefox knows to reload a page. It does seem like there's some network activity, so it probably is checking if there's a newer copy on the server. If that's the case, I'm not sure why you think it would be so slow. I find Firefox to be pretty fast, so ELinks should be at least as fast if it was doing the same server query, no? Overall, it seems to me like ELinks is a very fast browser, which should be no surprise since it's just text. When loading a page, I personally would definitely trade a split-second of time for the proper page. (I wouldn't want it to work as you describe, showing the old page and then updating it in the background. I'd prefer to wait.) Maybe this could be a setting for those that prefer speed and don't ever use ELinks to visit frequently-changing pages? (Notice I'm avoiding the whole issue of the complexity of implementing this...!) Reid _______________________________________________ elinks-users mailing list [email protected] http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/elinks-users
