Re: prefetching attribute (WAS Re: two ideas...)

Brian Behlendorf ([email protected])
Mon, 18 Dec 1995 09:16:55 -0800 (PST)


On Mon, 18 Dec 1995, William F. Hammond wrote:
> Brian Behlendorf <[email protected]> writes:
>
> > 2) Control of prefetching by the server. ...
> > ... The content provider needs some way of saying,
> > it would seem, that they're not interested in having each element
> > pre-fetched. Perhaps as an attribute to <A>? I don't have an easy
> > answer to this one.
>
> I think that the attribute idea is the answer.
>
> It is important to put the information provider in control of the question
> of prefetching permission.

Hmm, after a little thought, it seems like an even smoother solution would be
to leave pre-fetching up to the server completely. I.e., if someone requests
a page from my server, I return to them not only that page but the first n
bytes (or all) of each subpage in a multipart message. That leaves it up to
me, the page designer/server administrator, to decide exactly what parts of
my site can be optimized in such a way, and it lets me tune the prefetching
algorithms to my liking.

It may be both a protocol and UI challenge to model the act of a server
"throwing" unrequested content at a client... perhaps left for HTTP-NG?

Brian

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