revjim.net

I love (read: hate) reading information on the web that is the first or second resource for a particular search (using Google), and yet, a lot of the information there is incorrect:

This page states the following:

Important is that the name of the script start with the letters nph. This signals to the browser that it must not have cache. If the browser cached the data flow it might occur that short interrupts in the presentation of the picture can be seen and many pictures in a shorter time are showed at once. The switched off cache of the browser forces us to handle other parts of the HTTP protocol which we usually do not need explicitly.

Um… no. Not at all. Sections 2.6, 2.7, and 2.8 on this page get it right:

NPH = No Parsed Headers. The script undertakes to print the entire HTTP response including all necessary header fields. The HTTPD is thereby instructed not to parse the headers (as it would normally do) nor add any which are missing. [...] Possible circumstances where the use of NPH is appropriate are: 1) When your headers are sufficiently unusal that they might be differently parsed by different HTTPDs (eg combining "Location:" with a "Status:" other than 302). 2) When returning output over a period of time (eg displaying unbuffered results of a slow operation in 'real' time).

Yes. Much better. Unfortunately, I already knew that, and it wasn't the information I was looking for at all. This is just a sidetrack.