Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
Jan Steinman wrote:
(Chuckle!) Hoisted by your own petard!
When you edit a page on the wikimedia site and press "Edit help" you get: TA DA! A NEW WINDOW!
Yeah, and I hate it.
The reason for that particular, one sole link is that some version of Internet Explorer has a bug where if you follow a link from the edit page, then hit the back button, you lose all your work.
More sensible browsers don't consider that to be "loading" the page and will keep your edits when you hit back instead of reloading it.
Opera has been doing similarly lately. It doesn't delete the contents of the text box directly, but whenever I hit the "back" button, it immediately reloads the page from the server, and thus overwriting whatever was originally on it. I've had to get into the habit of having it "stop" whenever I use "back", just to save wasted time and occasionally data (and occasionally getting there late).
I've only noticed this on MediaWiki sites, both when I'm editing and when I'm not. I thought it might be a browser problem, but I've just noticed that Wikipedia for example serves pages with the header "Cache-control: private, s-maxage=0, max-age=0, must-revalidate" -- my own wiki is serving the same, sans s-maxage --- am I right in reading that this denies the browser the right to go back to the cached page after zero seconds?
*Muke!