How does the safari cache work?

[Mark Dancer]

On Fri, 5 Sep 2003, Robert Nicholson <robert at elastica.com> asked:

>Why does safari need to contact the web site if it's contents are 
>already in the cache?

Three reasons I know of (there may be more):

1. Safari (and all browsers) only keep a certain amount of information in the cache. Just because the site is in your history doesn't mean it's still in the cache.

2. Pages can be defined by the web site to have an expiry date, and that can be set to "immediate". So the page can be in the cache, but Safari (and all other browsers) will ignore the cached verion and download a new copy.

3. If the page is in the cache, and doesn't have an expiry date, Safari (and most other browsers) will contact the web site and download the "header" information for the page. If it matches the "header" information of the cached page, the cache is used, if not a new copy will be downloaded.

If you really want to view a web site offline, you should use a product like PageSucker to download the content into an archive, and then access it from your hard drive. Of course, then you'll never know if the site is updated.

Cheers,

Mark.


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