WolfSupernova wrote: After all and in most cases, we have Gig's worth of free and available disk space to work with and only a few hundred Meg's worth of memory You may, I don't. Just like a gas, my file storage fills to all available space. I keep having to delete stuff so I can put new stuff on. WolfSupernova wrote: And does your file need to be temporary? I sure hope so! I don't need tons of small files filling my temp directory! I hourly clean out my temp directory. The more files you have in a directory, the slower it is to locate them. Microsoft has a scheme whereby they break up the Temporary Internet Files in multiple directories and then have a file that it searches to find the actual file. WolfSupernova wrote: And finally, Microsoft itself uses temporary Internet files for caching information and they've developed both the Operating System and a pretty popular little web browser too, so maybe they know something we don't know? Sure, like how to cache web files between computer reboots. If you're just going to show a file thats generated on the fly, why cache it? In fact, IE won't cache certain files that a website flags as being generated on the fly. WolfSupernova wrote: Firstly, most of the articles claim that there'd be a need to write temporary "files" (plural), which is a little misleading. If you can write your entire DHTML document to one "about:blank", then you should be able to write the same content to one "temp.htm". So, you can write out all the images into the DHTML as well? That'd be a neat trick. And it'd bloat your html page too. So, my opinion is, the amount of memory needed for small files to be placed into an IE window is small and insignificant and is best suited for storing in memory. IE probably won't cache it anyways if it's on the file system. But don't get me wrong, it depends on what you're doing. Not all apps should keep everything in memory. I just feel that most of the apps write out a small amount of html anyways. I've found other solutions for displaying html, like QHTM, HtmlLayout, or PBears THtmlViewer. YMMV, but mine is sticking to memory. A hard drive is for persistent data. -- Joel Lucsy
