I would like to reduce network traffic by keeping local copies of at least
the main index pages on our local server. Once a day or week via a cron
job, our local server could fetch the latest HTML document from the main
index points around the Web. I assume some people are already doing this.
Our server home page would then refer to the local copies of the indexes,
rather than the originals.
What's missing is a link within the HTML documents themselves, back to
their original location. This would allow the "local caching" to be
extended further to individual client machines and gives a workable
self-reference until HTML+ is fully implemented. With just regular HTML,
document authors could change their documents, to look something like:
<TITLE>Starting Points for Internet Exploration</TITLE>
<H1><A HREF
="http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/StartingPoints/NetworkStartin
gPoints.html">Starting Points for Internet Exploration</A></H1>
That way, if someone wants to get the latest version to save to disk - this
is really handy for portable and home users browsing through documents
before connecting to the net - they just click on the link, get the latest
version and save to disk.
I know this will change once we have URNs and real distributed files, but
for now, there is usually a real home for a document, and I would like an
easy way to get it.
ka