IE 5.0 stylesheet caching bug

Dan Kohn (dan@teledesic.com)
Mon, 27 Dec 1999 23:19:48 -0800

IE 5.0 & 5.5 do not cache most stylesheets, resulting in a significantly
degraded user experience. In IE, go to <http://www.dankohn.com>, click on
books, click back, and click on books again. You will notice the latency as
IE refetches the stylesheet. Now, choose File: Work Offline and hit back.
Note that the page is displayed without the stylesheet because it's not
cached.

<http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/> shows the same behavior, but oddly
<http://www.xmlhack.com> and <http://www.xml.com> do not. It appears that
IE only caches stylesheets if they are referenced with a relative URL.

Unfortunately, I've become addicted to Todd Fahrner's Steely W3C Core Style
Sheet (which is gorgeous), but requires the browser sniffing functionality
from the W3. This would be fine if it were once per site visit, but it
winds up really slowing down someone who is trying to traverse my site by
requiring a new fetch for every page.

Any suggestions or workarounds?

- dan

--
Daniel Kohn <mailto:dan@dankohn.com>
tel:+1-425-519-7968  fax:+1-425-602-6223
http://www.dankohn.com