Question

I’m using this approach to display an icon near each link to a file from my web-application.

In order to avoid IE history cache problems I display a link as

<a href="path/to/the/file.xls?timestamp=0234562">FileName.xls</a>.

In this case the css rule doesn’t do his job.

Do you know how can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

The selector a[href$='.xls'] you probably use, applies only if it matches the end of HREF’s value. Use a[href*=.xls] instead.

Excerpt from Selectors Level 3:

[att*=val]

Represents an element with the att attribute whose value contains at
least one instance of the substring
“val”. If “val” is the empty string
then the selector does not represent
anything.

Edit

If you have control over the .htaccess file, you may ensure there to avoid cache problems, so you can use your original stylesheet rules. See Cache-Control Headers using Apache and .htaccess for further details.