Refreshing Xara Resources

[Acorn]

Dear Xara...

Over the years, TG has advised users of the need to purge the local browser cache so recent page changes can be seen by all. Clearly, a lot of the time this only affects the designer but, unfortunately, impacts keen clients too just at the time of closing the design. The experience of pressing Ctrl+F5 is blatantly not a solution. Meta headers are also not the way ahead either.

With the recent discourse in https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...er-browsers-OK, it is apparent that caching can be outwith the control of the designer; not just server caching but CDN and other hosting services. Your Xara developers have the ability to configure their development environment and therefore do not encounter these bugbears as frequently.

The major snafu is around cached CSS/JS assets; (jquery.js, prs4.js, roe.js, ani.css) are probably static. The ones that probably matter the most are (replaceMobileFonts.js, custom_styles.css, xr_all.css, xr_fonts.css, xr_text.css, xr_main.css).

My proposal is the latter clutch are uniquely timestamped (e.g., xr_fonts.css?1572007718266).
In the header of the index page, we would then have:

 <link rel="stylesheet" href="index_htm_files/xr_main.css?1572007718266"/>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="index_htm_files/custom_styles.css?1572007718266"/>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="index_htm_files/xr_text.css?1572007718266"/>
 <link rel="shortcut icon" type="image/ico" href="index_htm_files/favicon.ico"/>
 <link rel="icon" type="image/ico" href="index_htm_files/favicon.ico"/>
 <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="index_htm_files/tileicon.png"/>
 <link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="index_htm_files/tileicon.png"/>
 <script src="index_htm_files/roe.js"></script>
 <script src="index_htm_files/replaceMobileFonts.js?1572007718266"></script>
 <link rel="stylesheet" href="index_htm_files/xr_all.css?1572007718266" id="xr_mvcss"/>

This would result in an additional 128kB download for each new update but caching kicks in inbetween.

Could you implement this or a similar stratagem into your Xara HTML filer as a matter of high priority?

Thanks,
Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

I can't say I follow that exactly Acorn but I guess what you're asking is that js & css files are exported with unique file names (date stamped) every time to ensure they are not cached? Sounds like a very sensible & easy solution to me.

So +1

[Acorn]

I can't say I follow that exactly Acorn but I guess what you're asking is that js & css files are exported with unique file names (date stamped) every time to ensure they are not cached? Sounds like a very sensible & easy solution to me.
So +1

Thank you Egg, almost but not quite. The filename remains the same but the browser is conned into believing it is different with the query term (? + event.timeStamp) and therefore fetches it from the server, bypassing caching. The local cache then has
filename?event.timeStamp cached so a second and subsequent fetches use the cache.

Acorn

[Rob-Xar]

I'll take a look and raise this in our next feature set meeting.

Thanks
Rob

[Acorn]

Rob, grateful,
Acorn

[Egg Bramhill]

Thanks for the clarification Acorn.