OmniWeb 3b4: Open URL service and cache

[John Blumel]

This is possibly a more general issue involving OmniWeb's caching scheme, 
but, using the Open URL service, especially for viewing local ('file:' 
URL) documents that are under development, causes OmniWeb to demonstrate 
the behavior in question.

If a document is loaded into OmniWeb using the Open URL service, either 
via the Services menu or programmatically, then modified and the Open URL 
service is used to reload the document, the document is not refreshed by 
OmniWeb -- i.e., the old version of the document is displayed from cache 
rather than the new updated version. The document will refresh if the 
Reload function is used.

How and when does OmniWeb decide to update it's cache? Presumably when it 
expires based on the Cache settings in the Admin Preferences, although, 
it is not clear how, or if it's possible, to set these to disable 
caching. 

It would be nice if there were settings similar to Navigator's Check 
Documents Every Time, Once Per Session or Never options so that OmniWeb 
could be forced to check the file's last modification date/time before 
deciding to use the cached version or refresh it. To me at least, it 
would also seem reasonable for OmniWeb to not cache documents loaded via 
'file:' URLs as the cost of reloading these is relatively small.

Not caching local documents (or at least always checking mod date/time) 
would be of great benefit to HTML authors. While there are not very many 
HTML authoring programs for Rhapsody at this time (OmniWeb, Create and 
my, currently primitive, WebWriter), this application genre will likely 
expand greatly in the future. Since these programs generally contain 
functions allowing the user to preview their work in one or more 
browsers, it would greatly increase OmniWeb's usefullness if this could 
be done without requiring the author to hit the reload button.

If I'm missing some way that this can currently be made to happen, 
without requiring specific preference settings by the user, can someone 
please let me know.



John Blumel                               jblumel at omi.tulane.edu
Assistant Director                        (504) 599-6773
Office of Medical Informatics
Tulane University Medical Center