What is all that extra text after some html css/src attributes? (i.e. image.gif?214532)?

M

MrTwidget

New member
I see many web sites (mainly corporate ones) that have certain values inserted into their page source code. Normally looks something like this:

../images/subnav-mostpopular.gif?1244747771

-or-

/css/mycss.css?5489

I assume this is just some sort of scripting language doing this? I have been messing with html for a long time but I can't say I've ever come across this. If someone could clear this up for me and tell me how it's used and what benefits it has I would be surely grateful. Thank you all.
 
Anything after the "?" is called a query string. How the webmaster handles the query string depends on what their needs are.

I can tell you from personal experience, I've placed a random number or the date as a query string on some CSS files to ensure that the browser doesn't display a cached version of the page.
 
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