I have a web page that always needs to stay current. I do not want the browser to cache it. To that end, this meta tag is embedded with the page:
<meta name="Expires" content="Tue, 01 Jun 1999 19:58:02 GMT">
However, some browsers seem to ignore it. Chrome is particularly bad at it, though other browsers tend to do the same thing.
When I pick the page from the bookmarks bar, most of the time, it doesn’t even hit the server, just loads it from cache. If I then press F5, it does go to the server and fetch a new copy.
Am I missing something simple? I thought the expires meta tag is the way it’s done.
This is happening on an IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000.
Bottom line: looks like meta tags inside the HTML code pretty much do nothing. However, setting the expires tags within the HTTP does the trick nicely.
Send your expires headers using your server. Specifically, if you’re using apache, look at this:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_expires.html