Re: lynx-dev file download question

[David Woolley]

> This morning, when I downloaded this particular item, then go to save the 
> file, I am prompted with the following as the suggested file system name.
> 
> matrix.zip?prodID=3528&type=zip 

I would boycott them as they are defeating cacheing for purely commercial
(or maybe ignorance) reasons.  The commercial reason would be so as to
force you to go to their site for every download.

The best current compromise in these cases is to store the files in 
a directory with no list directory permissions and to redirect to that,
so that the bulk transfer can still be cached.  As this leads to name 
guessing, it might still be to their commercial advantage to use some
random number as the file name and change it every couple of weeks, also
using expires so that caches hold it for exactly the right time).

With modern software, which has not been configured to defeat this,
marking the item pre-expired can also work, as caches will always have
to reverify, and you can do things like Referer checking when they do.

(The lack of cacheability on the modern web is leading to ISPs in poorly
connected countries violating the cacheability rules in their caches to
try and achieve an adequate cache hit rate.  Tactics that rely on 
reverification would be fooled by this.)