[skyhigh007]

So, shopping carts are not suppose to cache any data? Why ? Well, my other php pages are integrated with the shopping cart. Ex: include a page or a file from the shopping cart. Where can I look for the " last expires " or related headers in a file ? Is there a specific code to look for ?

Thanks

[tomdkat]

Originally Posted by skyhigh007

So, shopping carts are not suppose to cache any data? Why ?

Well, it's not a matter of "supposed to" or not but if you think about it, a shopping cart generally has the stuff you want to purchase in it. If you don't buy what's in the cart, you don't want cached pages being reloaded when you visit the cart at some later point. So, it makes sense (to me at least) for a shopping cart page to NOT cache content.

Well, my other php pages are integrated with the shopping cart. Ex: include a page or a file from the shopping cart. Where can I look for the " last expires " or related headers in a file ? Is there a specific code to look for ?

Are you familiar with "grep"? If you are, use it to look for "Cache control" in the PHP files for the shopping cart. If you're not familiar with grep, use some other file searching tool to locate where the "Cache control" header is being injected and deal with it accordingly.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

Let me ask you this, whats the standard method or ways of stopping from headers, footers and shared images through out the site to reaload when the user goes to different page ?

[tomdkat]

I'm not sure I understand the question but I'll see if this answers it.

Normally, content sent to the browser is cached unless that content is NOT intended to be cached. If the content provider doesn't want their content to be cached, they will either configure the server or the web pages themselves to prevent caching by specifying the cache control HTTP headers (in the case of web server configuration) or pragma directives (in the case of web page configuration). I believe I read somewhere that use of the pragma directives is obsolete and using HTTP headers (web server configuration) is the best way to disable caching of content.

In the Apache world, the mod_expires module is used to control sending of cache control HTTP headers. The mod_expires directives can be specified in a .htaccess file allowing fine-tuned control over which content gets cached and which content doesn't.

So, in a nutshell the question isn't "what is the standard way of enabling caching?" but "what is a good way to disable caching?" since caching will be done be default. Since PHP pages are dynamically generated, I don't think they will be cached by default but I have no more information than that. I've been reading this frequently when looking at various pages that discuss PHP and cache control.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

I converted all the php pages to html files and took out the shopping cart software. My IE 7 browser is still not caching those images and I contact my server support, they said only IE is not caching , other browsers are fine and the web server is setup correctly.

[tomdkat]

What do the HTTP headers look like with the new set of pages? They *should* look just like the test pages you posted links to above.

Another thing to consider is using frames. Put the shopping cart stuff in a frame and leave the HTML headers and other stuff outside fo the frame where the shopping cart content is loaded.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

Response Headers
Date Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:24:27 GMT
Server Apache/2.0.63 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.63 OpenSSL/0.9.8b PHP/5.2.6 FrontPage/5.0.2.2634 mod_perl/2.0.3 Perl/v5.8.8
Last-Modified Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:05:05 GMT
Etag "3d94848-1361-8a6a9640"
Accept-Ranges bytes
Content-Length 4961
Content-Type text/html
Request Headers

User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.8.1.14) Gecko/20080404 Firefox/2.0.0.14
Accept text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive 300
Connection keep-alive

Cookie SQMSESSID=2681388fba254a4639792b367a7125fe
If-Modified-Since Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:05:05 GMT
If-None-Match "3d94848-1361-8a6a9640"

[tomdkat]

Ok, the headers above look fine. If things aren't caching in IE for you, you'll have to do some testing on other systems to make sure it's not just your system and you'll have to look into IE's caching settings to see if they will need to be adjusted. Lastly, you should verify if IE6 or IE7 have the same caching issues or not.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

I added "
<meta http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="revealtrans(duration=0.0)" />
<meta http-equiv="Page-Exit" content="revealtrans(duration=0.0)" /> "

to the header and I went to the IE browser --->Tools-->Internet Options--> Browsing History--> Settings----> Automatically and I can see the files related to the site in the Temporary Internet files folder in my windows xp desktop. However, I still see every pages gets reloaded when I click on each individual tabs or buttons.

[tomdkat]

Originally Posted by skyhigh007

I added "
<meta http-equiv="Page-Enter" content="revealtrans(duration=0.0)" />
<meta http-equiv="Page-Exit" content="revealtrans(duration=0.0)" /> "

That will enable IE-only page transitions and isn't related to this at all.

to the header and I went to the IE browser --->Tools-->Internet Options--> Browsing History--> Settings----> Automatically and I can see the files related to the site in the Temporary Internet files folder in my windows xp desktop. However, I still see every pages gets reloaded when I click on each individual tabs or buttons.

Just to make sure things are "clean", I would dump the browser cache AND the cookies. Now, the tricky part is determining if content is being downloaded or being loaded from the cache given how the page is loading. Again, the fact the content "paints" on the page doesn't necessarily mean the content is being downloaded again.

I don't know of any IE add-ons you can install to monitor network traffic or to ascertain if any element on a displayed page came from the browser cache or not.

How about starting the task manager and looking at the networking tab. Monitor the network traffic when you first load the page with an empty cache and no cookies. Then, refresh the page and see if the network traffic changes any. If it does, make note of how much it changes.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

Here's the structure for every html page that I have and all of them share the <body> background image and <wrapper> background image.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

<title>testing</title>

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://localhost/newer/favicon.ico" />
<link href="sitecss/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="pageHeader">

<div id="menu">
<ul id="navigation">
<li id="bt1" title="home"><a href="index.html" class="selected">Home</a></li>
<li id="bt2" title="about"><a href="about.html" >About</a></li>
<li id="bt3" title="gallery"><a href="gallery.html" >Gallery</a></li>
<li id="bt4" title="shop"><a href="shop.html" >Shop</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div id="middle">
<p>Testingggggggg</p>
</div>

<div id="footer">
<ul >
<li><a href="index.html">Home</a></li>
<li><a href="ship.html">Shipping</a></li>
<li><a href="privacy.html">Privacy Policy</a></li>
<li><a href="contact.html">Contact Us </a></li>
<li><a href="news.html">News</a></li>
<li><a href="terms.html">Terms of Use</a></li>
<li><a href="siteMap.html">Site Map</a></li>
</ul>


</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>

[tomdkat]

That looks cool. The point I'm making is you will need to find a way to verify if IE is actually downloading images repeatedly when the page is viewed repeatedly. By virtue of the image not appearing "instantly", that doesn' t necessarily mean IE is downloading anything again. What are the file sizes of the background images?

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

Background and Middle background images are 56KB and 42KB, JPGs

[tomdkat]

Those are just large enough that you might notice the browser loading the images when the page is displayed but that doesn't necessarily mean the browser is downloading them again.

If you can, temporarily change the image background sizes to some much smaller (like 5kb) and see if the loading speed in IE changes any.

Also, see if what I suggested above about using the Task Manager to monitor the network traffic will help you determine if those images are actually being downloaded each time or not.

Peace...

[skyhigh007]

alright, i will try that .