unable to view offline websites

  • Thread starter Thread starter Roger Ridgeway
  • Start date Start date
Roger Ridgeway said:
I have had a Pocket PC for over two years, first a Dell X5 and now a X50.

Were you using any intermediate software which might have been
stripping out nocache directives? In any case, a possible explanation
for your symptom would be that sites which previously allowed caching
now do not allow it or the contain noncacheable elements (such as ads)
which they previously didn't. Another possibility is that the sites have been
modified to reject robots and web spiders (such as the IE synchronizing
agent). Etc.

Post a particular URL you think you should be able to cache
if you need more help.


HTH

Robert Aldwinckle
---
 
Thanks for the reply. There could be am intermediate software doing this but
I can't think what it is.
Could you try www. cnn.com?
 
....
Thanks for the reply. There could be am intermediate software doing this but I can't think what it is.
Could you try www. cnn.com?


I could and FWIW will but it won't prove much because we aren't using
the same User-Agent. E.g. if the site prepares different responses for
different browsers it might give them different headers too.

Do you have any way to trace the HTTP responses that you are getting?
Or at least check if you can reload the page while in a Work Offline state?
E.g. load the page, set Work Offline (e.g., for IE desktop version press Alt-F,W)
then either load About:Blank over top of that and go back to try to reload
the one you're testing or clone the page in a new window (e.g. for IE desktop
version press Ctrl-N (aka Alt-F,N,W). In either case you may have to
repeatedly click Stay Offline as various bits of the page which are not
cached are ignored by the re-rendering. BTW if that is your symptom
that is your workaround (repeatedly clicking Stay Offline).

If you have a trace, something you can do to check on what is not being
cached (without a lot of tedious analysis) is to change your cache-checking
settings to Never (e.g. for IE desktop press Alt-T,O,Alt-S,N) and then
re-render the page using either of the above methods after setting
Work Online again.

Aha! That shows there are several problems with the main page
which would cause a problem for using this page offline in any other
context.

<example>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:56:52 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:56:49 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=60, private
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Expires: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:57:49 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 12653
Connection: close
</example>

There are two things in there which make the page impractical to use
as an offline web page. First, the Vary: header has the peculiar
effect in IE6 of making the page non-cacheable. Hmm... maybe not,
(it used to); I still see it in the TIF viewer; however, the next header
will certainly cause a problem after I close the windows which display it.
Hmm... Expires: didn't cause it to be deleted either. Very strange...
I wonder if that is because I set the cache-checking to Never?...
(That will be a handy discovery if so.) In any case I hope you can see
that there are headers in there which normally conspire against you being
able to reuse that page very much after it was originally loaded.

Now let's test if there are any differences from loading the page
using the agent used for creating offline content:

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; MSIECrawler)

Nope. It's the same:

<example>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:23:48 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:23:40 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=60, private
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Expires: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:24:40 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 12749
Connection: close
</example>

It behaves the same too. (I.e., multiple uses of Stay Offline required
to make as much of it as possible to show up when Work Offline is set.)

Out of curiosity I will leave the Favorite defined and my cache-checking
set to Never (though that will be quite a nuisance with other pages)
to see just how long the page can be used while offline.

BTW I know nothing about your platform so I hope you can adapt
some of these ideas to it.


Good luck

Robert
---
 
okay, how about www.cnn.com

Robert Aldwinckle said:
...


I could and FWIW will but it won't prove much because we aren't using
the same User-Agent. E.g. if the site prepares different responses for
different browsers it might give them different headers too.

Do you have any way to trace the HTTP responses that you are getting?
Or at least check if you can reload the page while in a Work Offline
state?
E.g. load the page, set Work Offline (e.g., for IE desktop version press
Alt-F,W)
then either load About:Blank over top of that and go back to try to reload
the one you're testing or clone the page in a new window (e.g. for IE
desktop
version press Ctrl-N (aka Alt-F,N,W). In either case you may have to
repeatedly click Stay Offline as various bits of the page which are not
cached are ignored by the re-rendering. BTW if that is your symptom
that is your workaround (repeatedly clicking Stay Offline).

If you have a trace, something you can do to check on what is not being
cached (without a lot of tedious analysis) is to change your
cache-checking
settings to Never (e.g. for IE desktop press Alt-T,O,Alt-S,N) and then
re-render the page using either of the above methods after setting
Work Online again.

Aha! That shows there are several problems with the main page
which would cause a problem for using this page offline in any other
context.

<example>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:56:52 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:56:49 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=60, private
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Expires: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 04:57:49 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 12653
Connection: close
</example>

There are two things in there which make the page impractical to use
as an offline web page. First, the Vary: header has the peculiar
effect in IE6 of making the page non-cacheable. Hmm... maybe not,
(it used to); I still see it in the TIF viewer; however, the next header
will certainly cause a problem after I close the windows which display it.
Hmm... Expires: didn't cause it to be deleted either. Very strange...
I wonder if that is because I set the cache-checking to Never?...
(That will be a handy discovery if so.) In any case I hope you can see
that there are headers in there which normally conspire against you being
able to reuse that page very much after it was originally loaded.

Now let's test if there are any differences from loading the page
using the agent used for creating offline content:

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
MSIECrawler)

Nope. It's the same:

<example>
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:23:48 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Last-Modified: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:23:40 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=60, private
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Expires: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:24:40 GMT
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 12749
Connection: close
</example>

It behaves the same too. (I.e., multiple uses of Stay Offline required
to make as much of it as possible to show up when Work Offline is set.)

Out of curiosity I will leave the Favorite defined and my cache-checking
set to Never (though that will be quite a nuisance with other pages)
to see just how long the page can be used while offline.

BTW I know nothing about your platform so I hope you can adapt
some of these ideas to it.


Good luck

Robert
 

Except for all the prompts it seems to work fine.
BTW it is a real PITA offline because of this:
<example>
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="1800">
</example>

I had to revert to Every visit... (from the Never. I said I would use)
because Never made my web mail service unusable.
I am really surprised that the page's Expiry date is being ignored.
I thought that it made a file a candidate for deletion.
If the main HTML document gets deleted the Favourite will no longer
be usable offline.


HTH

Robert
---

 
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