Query-string-based revision control

One of the easy ways to improve the perceived response time of your web site is to ensure that your web server sets explicit Expires: HTTP header on the static web page components (JavaScript libraries, CSS files, images …), thus reducing the number of HTTP requests sent by the browser. However, if you change your JavaScript code or CSS, your visitors could be stuck with the old version for a long time.

If you use static HTML and a decent development environment, you can easily rename the JavaScript or CSS files (and the HTML pages get updated as a side effect). For more complex environments, you could use an easy trick: append the revision number as a query string after the file name:

<link href="myStyle.css?57” rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
<script src="myCode.js?42" type="text/javascript"></script>

Most web servers ignore the query string after the name of a static file, but the browsers perform the caching on whole URL (so x.js?1 is different from x.js?2).