[Project_owners] XMLHttpRequest - how can one bypass cache?

[Myk Melez]

Andrey Gromyko wrote:
> There is at least one news-feed I know which has 100+ new entries a day and Firefox (which, I assume, "respects the cache") doesn't fetch an updated xml without unless I press Shift+Reload. What would you say about that? (rhetorical question...)
>   
It's possible that the site isn't configured correctly, but sites might 
intentionally set long cache timeouts for frequently updated sites to 
reduce the load on their servers.  Even if a feed gets updated every 
minute (or multiple times a minute, as with some del.icio.us feeds), 
that doesn't mean the site wants every user checking for updates that 
frequently.

As a matter of fact, Slashdot used to ban IPs for reloading their feeds 
too quickly (perhaps they still do; haven't checked lately).  That 
shouldn't be necessary, as feed readers should respect the cache and 
other mechanisms sites correctly use to manage their traffic, even if 
some sites use them incorrectly.

-myk