Abhishek Reddy — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:44:50 +0000

Ah, I suppose that works too. Almost the inverse of my guess.

ibeinboston — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 16:46:45 +0000

I found out an answer...

It's used to bypass a browsers cache.
if the file is scripts.js
and I change the file, the browser will retain the cahced version and use that...therefore not showing the updates to the file.

Appending ?v1.0 to the end is just a dummy
If I updated the javascript and rename to ?v2.0
the full filename ... scripts.js?v2.0 ... is interpreted by the browser as a new file, so it gets the new one.

Abhishek Reddy — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:57:31 +0000

I think your guess is right. If not mod_rewrite, then it'll use whatever server-side language they prefer, to pass through to the correct file based on the version in the query string.

The reason for having these queries might be that any new versions of the CSS or JS files don't have to be guaranteed as backward-compatible for statically archived pages.

It's good practice to have a default case for switched inputs, so they'll have it load the latest file if no version is given.

And welcome to TWF.

ibeinboston — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 13:13:58 +0000

Look at the source code for:

http://slashdot.org
http://www.netvibes.com
http://www.lifehacker.com

Greg K — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 05:56:12 +0000

Can you give an example of a site using this?

-Greg