Tag Archives: IE

Four Tips for Setting up HTTP File Downloads

March 03th, 2010 - 3:31PM

Web sites don’t just contain pages; sometimes you need to provide files that users can download. Putting a file on your web server and linking to it from an HTML page is just the first step. You also need to be aware of the HTTP response headers that affect file downloads. These four tips cover some of the issues you may run into: Tip #1: Forcing a Download and Controlling the File Name Providing a download link in the HTML is easy: … <a href="http://download.httpwatch.com/httpwatch.exe">Download</a> … It works well for binary files like setup programs and ZIP archives that the … Continue reading →

Using Protocol Relative URLs to Switch between HTTP and HTTPS

February 02th, 2010 - 1:55PM

Attempting to use HTTP resources on an secure web page is a guaranteed way to annoy IE users, because it generates a confusing security warning for anyone running with the default IE settings. Our previous post on fixing this message in IE 8 is responsible for more than 50% of the traffic and comments on this blog. Hopefully, Microsoft will take note and change this in a future version of IE. In the meantime, it’s important to avoid this warning by ensuring that every image, CSS and Javscript file on a secure page is accessed using HTTPS. For content on … Continue reading →

Ajax Caching: Two Important Facts

August 08th, 2009 - 6:17PM

Ajax calls are just like any other HTTP request that might be used to build a web page. However, due to their dynamic nature people often overlook the benefit of caching them. Rule 14 of High Performance Web Sites states: Make Ajax Cacheable Make sure your Ajax requests follow the performance guidelines, especially having a far future Expires header. The rest of this blog post covers two important facts that will help you understand and effectively apply caching to Ajax requests. Fact #1 : Ajax Caching Is The Same As HTTP Caching The HTTP and Cache sub-systems of modern browsers … Continue reading →