The safest way is to serve your pages via https (note the "s"), because
most browsers will delete everything they recieve via https after they
are closed and the session is ended (bank websites work with this).
You'll need an SSL certificate for this, but some hosting packages come
with a free certificate, so you may have one.
More practically (and if you do not need to uncache sensitive data), you
can also put these meta tags in the header of your pages:
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="Expires" content="Mon, 20 Dec 1998 01:00:00
GMT">
The date can lie in the past (deprecated but works) or be generated by
PHP to lie in the very near future (e.g. five minutes after the page is
being served).
These tags work only, if the browser respects them. Google a bit to find
which browsers and which browser versions do not respect them.
You can also send the same info to the browser as headers:
header( "Expires: Mon, 20 Dec 1998 01:00:00 GMT" );
header( "Last-Modified: " . gmdate("D, d M Y H:i:s") . "
GMT" );
header( "Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate" );
header( "Pragma: no-cache" );
These headers are sent BEFORE the HTML and not displayed in the source
code, but they are identical to the meta tags (compare the "Pragma" tag
I gave above and the "Pragma" header below). I guess browsers take
headers more seriously than tags (because they feel they are talking to
another server, not just displaying some faulty code written by some
n00b), but I don't know.
Google a bit around this quick info and "prevent browser caching" to get
more info on this.
I have a feature on a mediawiki site that updates the
home page every
day based on current date. Problem is: browser caching is causing the
page to not be updated for returning users. Is there a way to fix this?
Thx, LainieH
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