iOS Web App - how to deal with overzealous app caching? - iphone

Question

I've been developing a pretty complicated HTML5 web app for the past month. Last night my iPhone suddenly decided to cache all JS, CSS, and images and not load any updated copies. This happened on my partner's iPhone too, so I'm going to assume it's affecting all users of our app.
Needless to say, clearing the browser cache, deleting the web app, restarting the phone, & restarting the wireless connection do nothing to fix the problem.
Removing <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> solves the problem, but creates a new problem since we need the app to run like...an app.
We're not going to go around appending the old trick ?number to the end of all our scripts, stylesheets, and images either. That's ridiculous. Also -- if we were to implement something like this, it would have to be some sort of dynamic JS implementation. Our app is one HTML page that loads most scripts, and additional pages are AJAXed in, additional data is also obtained via AJAX. I guess this could be done, but I'm hoping for a more elegant solution. Ya know, I feel like I shouldn't have to do anything since this all worked without a hitch for an entire month.
Using the cache-control, expires, and pragma <meta> tags doesn't do us any good either, as this is purely an iOS web app problem. Caching works normally in mobile Safari, mobile Chrome, and all desktop browsers. It appears that iOS has a separate cache for apps, including web apps, that the user can not clear.
It seems that many SO users have encountered this problem, but I can't find any satisfactory solutions. Has anyone out there in a similar situation solved this problem? Could I use a manifest file to specify not to cache several files? It seems like manifest files are used to do the opposite.

Answer 1

For what it's worth, and it's not a perfect solution, we had to settle with appending query strings. I've written a shell script to make this and a few other tasks bit more automated, you can look at the source on GitHub. A few details:
It's designed for JS but can easily be edited to handle CSS too.
It takes all files listed in script_order.txt and compiles them with Google's Closure Compiler
Groups them into chunks under 25kb when possible (iPhone won't cache anything over 25kb pre-gzip, although apparently this extends only to browsers and not standalone webapps)
Outputs a PHP file with <script> tags that have a ?v=timestamp appended to the script filenames. If you're working with static HTML and can't include a PHP file, you could rewrite the output to append the script tags to your index.html file.
Another pretty hacky solution would be to save your JS/CSS with a .php file extension, and in those files set the headers to something like this:
<?php
header("content-type: application/javascript");
header('Cache-Control: no-cache');
header('Pragma: no-cache');
?>
window.alert('hello world');
EDIT:
Setting the date to 2, 3 or 4 days in the future, start the app from homescreen and then set the date back to normal also can do the trick.