Large Text on Betfair

[wb]

Very often, when I log on to betfair, Some of the text appears quite large. In particular, the text up the top, such as 'home, my account, about us' etc.
Also, the markets on the left appear in large text.

The problem is rectified when I click on 'home' - the page will re-load and appear as normal.

Has anyone else had this problem. Could it be something to do with my PC?

Thanks,

Wayne

[markwales]

I have the same problem Wayne. No idea what it is.

It sometimes tells me my browser is not up to date too, but I have the latest browser, very odd, but loads fine when refreshing.

[Win2Win]

It's your PC....

PCWORLD state: Reformat the drive, then purchase new computer from them :doh

[GlosRFC]

Both problems are caused by a combination of your PC and ISP cache and the CSS (cascading style sheet) files.

When you create an HTML file, you can include all of the code to determine the colour scheme, font sizes, layout etc. of the page. Unfortunately, on a large site, this creates a lot of code and it's very difficult to edit thousands of HTML files if you simply wanted to change a single colour.

The solution is to use CSS files. Essentially, this separate file contains all of the formatting information for the page or pages that are loaded. The page itself contains the text you see displayed with references to the CSS file. When they want to change the colour scheme, all they need to do is make a single change to the CSS file and every page containing a reference to it is automatically updated.

But why are you getting the problems you've highlighted? Well there's another ruse that helps make surfing quicker and that's called caching. Whenever you visit a site, the files are stored in your temporary internet folder so that, on your next visit, your browser will read them directly from your hard disk rather than downloading them afresh each time.

ISPs cottoned on to this idea too so now they have caches on their servers. If Fred visits Betfair, a copy of the files is stored on the website server. When Wayne visits the site via the same ISP, their server gives him the cached files instead of trying to download them from the Betfair server each time. This includes all of those useful CSS files mentioned above.

Now, in theory, you can enter an expiry date into the HTML files which tells these caches when a page is expired and that a new one needs to be downloaded from the original server. But caches are not infallible - what if two people access the same site but the page has expired? The cache might decide that Fred has the new page but Wayne now has the cached version of the page that Fred was viewing moments before. Meanwhile Keith, with his expired page, visits Betfair and the cache is updated so now Fred is viewing a cached version as well. Multiply this hundreds of thousands of times and who now can say they're viewing the latest version of the site? And sometimes those really useful CSS files aren't downloaded because their expiry dates are set differently from the rest of the page.

So what is happening is that you are viewing a combination of locally cached files (held on your PC), remotely cached files (held on your ISP server) and fresh files (direct from the Betfair server) and sometimes they have problems determining which CSS files should really be associated with each page.

The quick fix solution is to try to force the browser to reload newer versions of the file either by, as Mark said, hitting the home button or by pressing the Refresh button on your browser. Holding the SHIFT key when you press the Refresh button should also force the browser to download the latest version however some ISPs will simply load the latest version that's stored on their cache.

It's also a good idea to empty your temporary internet folders directory on a regular basis - go to Tools, Internet Options, Delete Files and click OK.

[wb]

Thanks for that Glos. As always, very interesting and informative.

[Win2Win]

Thanks for that Glos. As always, very interesting and informative.
He cut'n'pasted that from 'Vegys PC Help Site' :laugh

[bigcumba]

'Vegys PC Help Site' :laugh

Vegy has quite a reputation as a PC helper.... he's always polishing their truncheons....