accessing the CSS in browser using question mark (?) in end

Question

can someone explain what is the difference in accessing CSS in browser by putting question mark ? in the end and why the new CSS is not making any affe

Answer 1

You need to add something after the ? then change it when you change the CSS. What is happening is a browser will cache anything that doesn't change for a specific period, it does that by checking file names. so main.css? is still main.css? Anything after the question mark is a query string, generally it's used to pass data to a particular file. In this case it's just used to change the file string so the browser will update it every time it changes without affecting the file itself.

There are a couple of ways you can handle this, the first is manually changing the version, probably the easiest idea if you have a single header file, as in a template system that always loads the same head data.

This is essentially adding a value that changes every time you save the file and results in something like this, the next time I save the file that time= value will change: