文件版本控制以消除浏览器缓存问题

Question

I have a web page that over_writes a CSS file when the page admin changes a few attributes through a web form and a database table. My problem is that the browser sometimes caches the old file and ignores the new version. It has been suggested to me that I should use a file versioning scheme that would basically change the name of the file so that I would never have to worry about the browser caching the old version. Is there any other way around this problem besides the versioning scheme?

Answer 1

When including your CSS file in the HTML header, you could simply add a parameter to the query string:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css?v=2">

In your case, you could increment this number programmatically every time the page admin changes something (assuming you have set $cssVersion somewhere):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css?v=<?php echo $cssVersion; ?>">

You would have to store $cssVersion in a database column or in a file.