Browser not fetching new HTML tag
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We added a plugin that has a field to add the required script tag which gets put into the HTML head tag, but we found only showed up on the home page, but the next day showed up on all the pages as designed. We checked the plugin’s source code and see nothing amiss there, and it worked fine for me on local and stage (though my browser’s caching has been more predictable).
Since nothing was changed during that period, we think the browser was just using cached HTML and not fetching the new tag…
I know we can add a random number or unix timestamp to the end of the file name in the tag, but I thought that only refreshes the fetched code (because it’s fetching an updated file), and wouldn’t even be visible to a browser that isn’t aware there’s a new tag anyways because it’s only using cached content…
Do you see what I mean? If the browser scans through the cached HTML tags, it can’t check that a tag not even in the cache has a different number at the end because it doesn’t know it exists and it doesn’t check for a new tag there…
Is there some WordPress-y or other solution to make sure newly-added tags get fetched by the browser? Does adding a random number to the end of the filename somehow make the browser check for a tag that doesn’t exist in the cache?
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Andrew, let me better explain:
1. Typical scenario: A previously-downloaded and utilized HTML script tag with a src attribute (downloaded the very first time a user hits the webpage) runs the src URL JavaScript properly. Then on the server that JavaScript file gets some code changes, the user hits the site again, sees the tag URL is the same and just uses the cache code. Appending a random number or timestamp to the tag’s URL will force the browser to re-download the script and run the updated code.
2. Our scenario: The HTML script tag was never loaded on the user’s browser’s initial page load because it didn’t exist at the time. The user hits the page again, but this time even though the new tag has been added on the server, it’s not fetched or added by the browser.
How would adding a random number or timestamp to the src URL force the browser to refresh something it never downloaded initially? The whole point of adding that number is so the browser sees a different URL than before so it things it’s downloading a new file; but if it never sees the tag to begin with (or on another page hit), and is just loading whatever HTML was in its cache at the time, it will not download the tag the first time.
If I’m not understanding how browsers fetch newly-added tags, please explain how adding a number to the end of the tag’s src URL forces it to do that.
My only solution to them was tell them to hit Ctrl+F5 to force the browser to fetch ALL of the current HTML, including new tags.
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