On 02 Mar 2005 07:49:12 +0100, Anders Wegge Jakobsen wegge@wegge.dk wrote:
No, no. You must have missed the rest of the thread - there's a lot more to it than that, because there are various levels of *internal* caching in addition to the browser caching.
It was a reply to the proposal of a Dynamic namespace.
OK, sorry if I seemed a bit rude. But the Special namespace *isn't* really a good example, because it doesn't really exist - Special pages have no content of their own stored in the database, but are basically self-contained PHP scripts with access to MediaWiki's functions and to the database. This is very different from having an editable page, which exists in the database, has history, etc, but which contains content which must never be cached.
And, as I say, although Special pages send cache control headers to browsers and other *external* caches, they don't ever interact with the *internal* caches, so have no need for code to bypass them. A page in the database with dynamic content, however defined, would have to have some way of disabling or by-passing the internal caching processes, which does not yet exist.
Meanwhile, if somebody *did* code a cache by-pass mechanism, it would be interesting to consider if (as some people have suggested in the past) some of the Special pages could be made to produce a {{transcludable}} version of their content. But that's just me pipe-dreaming...