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07-22-2008, 03:49 PM

[eluser]Aquillyne[/eluser]
[quote author="Randy Casburn" date="1216780923"]CI MIME type caching.

Possible Help Documentation
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By default, when caching is turned on, CI will cache your output as type text/html.

Simultaneous caching of other MIME types is also supported. This would allow you to maintain a long term cache of one file while periodically updating other files without the need to update your entire cache. As an example, you may send dynamic CSS from a View file and have that CSS saved to a cache. The CSS cache file may rarely change. The CSS styles may apply to an HTML View file that is saved to a separate cache file that can change independently of the CSS cache. This could also apply to a separate JavaScript file built from a View file and saved independently to a separate cache file. Now if you edit your JavaScript View content the only the JavaScript cache will require a refresh while the other cache files will remain untouched.[/quote]

I don't like this shift back to focus on MIME-types. Nor do I like the idea of default caching as text/html! PHP and CI may be designed with html in mind, but they aren't capable of nothing but that. That seems limiting, and furthermore a limitation, a "my html way or explicitly override on my highway" sort of thing.

I'm not really proposing all this as a solution to caching MIME-types as much as a solution to caching headers i.e. meta-data, in general. Because that's the problem. Meta-data is attached to the document, but stripped from it in the cache.

Here's an example not to do with mime-types. Let's just say you want to cache your error 404 page. Your 404 page outputs the header "HTTP 1.0 404 Page Not Found" (I can't remember the exact wording of that header, but you get the picture: it's not a mime-type). Well, when that 404 page is served from the cache it won't have that header anymore!

There are two things that a server side script is responsible for, regards the client-end browser: giving it content, and giving it headers. Currently, CI strips off those headers when caching is turned on.

It's that very, very general problem I want to patch.