Following on from the discussion we had at the Recorder meeting regarding the infomational side panel in the taxon dictionary being slow, a suggestion occurred to me: why not cache the content? It is just HTML, right? At the moment, the db has to be queried every time a taxon is selected in order to generate the HTML, and this query is obviously slow. So why not cache the generated HTML in the database and only regenerate it if the taxon, or its associated details, change? The vast majority of taxa never change and so the cache would rarely get stale, but in addition to auto-clearing the cache when a dictionary update is performed, there could be a refresh button to manually regenerate the HTML.

If the inconsistencies in the side-panel are addressed and its performance improved, it will become a really useful feature.