expires and gif89a

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

Hey what's the deal with the buggy netscape that doesn't deal with
Expires: and gif89 animations?  Is there any workaround?  Which version(s) 
of netscape is it a problem with?  I don't remember seeing any workaround
in the previous discussion. 

Dean

Re: expires and gif89a

[Rob Hartill <ro...@imdb.com>]

On Sun, 9 Mar 1997, Dean Gaudet wrote:

> Hey what's the deal with the buggy netscape that doesn't deal with
> Expires: and gif89 animations?

The deal is that Navigator caches the first expires date and never
updates it unless the file on the server is 'touch'ed. It's possible
for Navigator to then get into an infinite loop when the anim expires.
I've seen it re-request the animation after each animated loop.

> Is there any workaround?

sadly no, the only thing you can do is reduce the number of times
the animation repeats. 3 seems to be a good value. I've also seen
Navigator reload indefinitely on animations that didn't have an
Expires header, but those cases are less of a problem.

> Which version(s) of netscape is it a problem with?

I haven't tested 4.0  - damn thing core dumps on me so much I've
gone back to 3 which is affected. I informed Netscape of the problem
during their 3.0 beta cycle  :-(((   and even twisted the arm of someone
there to talk to the developers face to face about the problem.




rob