For
the purpose of
the question I need to create a simple fictitious scenario.
I have
the following trivial page with one link, call it page A:
<a class="red-anchor" onclick="change_color(event);" href="http://mysite.com/b/">B</a>
With
the associated Javascript function:
function change_color(e)
{
var event = e || window.event;
var link = event.target;
link.className = "green-anchor";
}
And I have
the appropriate CSS to make
the anchor
red or green based on
the classname.
This is working. That is, when I click
the anchor it changes color from
red to green, which is briefly visible before
the browser loads page B.
But if I then use
the BACK button to return to page A I get different behavior in different browsers.
In Safari,
the anchor is still green (desired behavior)
In Firefox it reverts to
red
I imagine that Safari is somehow updating its cached version of
the page, whereas Firefox isn't.
So my first question is: is there any way to get FF to update
the cached page, or is something else happening here?
Secondly: I have a different implementation where I use an ajax call. In this I set
the class of
the anchor using a session variable, something like...
<a class="<?php echo $_SESSION["color"]; ?>" ...[snip]... >B</a>
And the javascript function makes an additional ajax call that changes
the "color" session variable.
In this case both Safari
and Firefox work as expected. When going back from B to A
the color is still green. But I can't for
the life of me figure out why it should be different to
the non-ajax case. I have tried many different permutations
and for it to work on FF
the "color" session variable MUST change (i.e.
the ajax call itself is not somehow reloading
the cache). But on coming BACK,
the page is being reloaded from
the cache (verified in Firebug), so how is
the page even accessing this session variable if it isn't reprocessing
the page
and running that fragment of php in
the anchor?
I figure there must be something fundamental here that I am not understanding. Any insight would be much appreciated.
