Bert Doorn wrote:
G'day
a) it's more efficient because the style sheet only gets downloaded
once!
b) you can reformat your whole site just by changing the CSS file!
and what, we just hope nobody notices that they contradict each
other?
To me it's only a contradiction if you read "once" to mean "once in
your lifetime" while I'm sure the intention is to say that the
presentation does not need to be reloaded with every (x)html page you
load on the site during a visit.
Yes, no matter how many pages on a site you visit, if they all reference,
say, "common.css," then the file will already be in cache and will not be
downloaded again. However, see caveat below.
Having said that, I don't know how long browsers would actually cache
the style sheet - I have had plenty of cases where I've updated it and
had to resort to Ctrl+F5 to see the update (in various browsers). That
might just be a server setting, but I don't know. Changing the
Actually, there are settings at the server level, within the individual
browser, and which can be added to the page itself as meta-tags, which will
affect whether and for how long a page is cached. Internet Explorer, for
example, allows settings all the way from "never check for a new page" to
"every time I visit the page," although my experience has been that IE is
extremely flakey about honoring cache settings, even sometimes requiring a
manual deletion of cache files before it will reload a changed page.
css filename is not a good idea as you would then need to edit every
html file to point to the updated file?
Cheers,
Scott
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