RE: IE 5.0 stylesheet caching bug

Dan Kohn (dan@teledesic.com)
Tue, 28 Dec 1999 17:07:04 -0800

Roy, that completely fixed the problem, leading to dramatically enhanced
performance. And, the browser sniffing functionality still appears to work
as designed, even with the .css suffix.

Todd, I would suggest changing the W3C pages to link to Steely.css and
adding a note about the bug. IE 5 is a very popular browser, and it would
be a shame for CSS or the W3C Core StyleSheets to get an undeserved
reputation for bad performance.

Finally, who can we bug at MSFT to get them to stamp out this bug before IE
5.5 is released? Henrik? Yaron?

Thanks, Roy. You're a stud.

- dan

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




-----Original Message-----
From: Roy T. Fielding [mailto:fielding@kiwi.ICS.UCI.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, 1999-12-28 11:58
To: Dan Kohn
Cc: 'fahrner@pobox.com'; Fork (E-mail); 'www-style@w3.org'
Subject: Re: IE 5.0 stylesheet caching bug 




>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.


That is because the URL being used for the stylesheet is negotiated,
which results in a Vary header field being returned by Apache, which
for some incredibly stupid reason MSIE refuses to cache even though
its user agent is based on a non-shared cache.


   GET http://www.w3.org/StyleSheets/Core/Steely HTTP/1.0
   Accept: */*
   User-Agent: GET/0.6 libwww-perl/0.50
   Host: www.w3.org
   
   HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   Date: Tue, 28 Dec 1999 18:47:00 GMT
   Server: Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) PHP/3.0.11
   Content-Location: Steely.css
   Vary: negotiate
   TCN: choice
   Connection: close
   Content-Type: text/css


The workaround is just to use the filename extension on the URL ".css"
and avoid the negotiation code altogether.  Since the usage is unable
to handle anything but CSS, not using the extension doesn't improve
the longevity of this reference.


....Roy