Browser Detection & ISP caching

Anon

I'm having some problems with some pages. I have included some browser detection in my PHP pages that modify some content depending on the browser. However my ISP uses "transparent" caching and holds a copy of the page serving that when another request gets made. This seems to be causing some problems, for example if the last request via that ISP was from Netscape and then one is made from IE the page is being returned to the browser with the Netscape content.

Does anybody know of an easy way to get round this transparent caching? The only thing I can think of is to convert all the browser dependant stuff to JavaScript so that it is done after the user recieves the page.

ame12

I've used brute-force cache defeating logic before. This involves always including a hidden field like this:

where $rv is a random integer based upon time-of-day or some such. Every form get and post (and even hrefs if you want) that you do should now include this random seed so that subsequent requests can't be cached by a server somewhere.

This is a pain but I've found it necessary in tough situations like the one you describe.

Dave

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