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Browser caching

Sometimes a browser will cache your Thoth documents. Refreshing a page does not refresh any cached pages. Often, XML documents or CSS documents are cached to make sites run faster. Unfortunately, if you change a Thoth document or a stylesheet, then the changes will not show up since the browser doesn't refresh such cached pages. I have often found myself making changes to my Thoth code or my stylesheets, then I test the application in Safari, and it doesn't seem to be changing at all. Naturally I assume my code is wrong so I spend unnecessary time trying to figure out what is wrong. In the end I realize it's just that the page has been cached by the browser.

Holding down Shift and clicking the refresh button sometimes refreshes all cached pages in most browsers, but sometimes it doesn't refresh XML and CSS documents. To refresh these pages, you need to open those pages in your browser and only then hold down Shift and click the refresh button. For example, if absconditus.com/index.html uses a Thoth document named main.xml, and I need to refresh main.xml, I need to open absconditus.com/main.xml in the browser, refresh it, and then open index.html again. That usually does the trick. Sometimes you can also set the browser's Preferences to refresh all pages every time you visit a page, and this usually takes care of the problem. If you have control over your META tags, you can use them to refresh the page each time a user visits.

In any case, refreshing these pages is becoming a standard part of my debugging/development process when things aren't working right, and caching is often the culprit. If you're working with XML and/or CSS, always check for caching problems, even if you're not working with Thoth.