? Content Entered in Forms Sometimes Duplicated and Sometimes Not ?

[Nehmo Sergheyev]

In IE 6 when you hit Ctrl + N, you get a new window with the same page
loaded. But if there are forms on the pages, you may or may not get what
you've already entered in the forms duplicated in the new window.

For example, on http://www.smithliving.com/home.html (fill in and submit
the form for a free pad of paper, I think), when I hit Ctrl + N, what I
entered in the forms gets duplicated on the new page.

But while posting in Google Groups, when I hit Ctrl + N, only the
unaltered original posting page gets duplicated in the new window.

What makes the entered content of one kind of form duplicatable but
another not?



(This is not a *problem*; I'm simply curious.)

 

[Andrew Urquhart]

In IE 6 when you hit Ctrl + N, you get a new window with the same page
loaded. But if there are forms on the pages, you may or may not get
what you've already entered in the forms duplicated in the new window.

For example, on http://www.smithliving.com/home.html (fill in and
submit the form for a free pad of paper, I think), when I hit Ctrl +
N, what I entered in the forms gets duplicated on the new page.

But while posting in Google Groups, when I hit Ctrl + N, only the
unaltered original posting page gets duplicated in the new window.

What makes the entered content of one kind of form duplicatable but
another not?

To hesitate an educated guess, I suspect that IE makes a decision based
on the freshness information of the webpage.

www.smithliving.com/home.html returns these 2 headers amongst others:
ETag: "e0aa28f1efc31:b49"
Last-Modified: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:15:00 GMT

Upon Control-N IE either assumes that the page has not changed since the
last request a few moments ago or makes a HTTP request and gets a 304
from the server, it then duplicates the pages 'as is' form data and all.

Google Groups pages however do not send such freshness data, but request
that clients not cache the pages at all with this header:
Cache-control: private

So upon Control-N IE honours that instructions and requests a fresh copy
of the page from the server, which doesn't contain your form
information.